Carl Sandburg’s “Calls” is a short, quiet poem built almost entirely on the act of waiting. Sandburg, the Illinois-born poet whose early free verse made him a central voice in American modernism, published this piece in his 1920 collection *Smoke and Steel*. By then he was already known for *Chicago Poems* and for a style that mixed plain Midwestern speech with sweeping lyricism. Written in the years after the First World War, when many poets were turning toward stripped-down observation rather than grand rhetoric, “Calls” moves away from city streets and factory smoke toward birds, dusk, and water, using the natural world to make sense of human longing.
The poem unfolds through a chain of “because” clauses before arriving at its real sentence: “i am waiting.” Each clause offers a different model of calling. The speaker says he has called “as the flame flamingo calls,” then shifts to something stranger: “the want of a spotted hawk / is called.” That inversion makes desire itself sound out; want is not just felt, it is voiced. In the third clause, warblers “shoot the running / waters of short songs to the / homecoming warblers,” an image in which song becomes a stream, urgent and directed toward others. The enjambment makes “running / waters” spill forward, just as the birds’ music does.
Sandburg does not rely on a fixed rhyme scheme or meter. Instead, the poem’s music comes from repetition and balance: “because” opens clause after clause, while pairs like “wing to wing / and song to song” create a chant-like pulse. The lowercase “i” at the end reinforces the speaker’s humility; he is not a grand romantic voice but a small creature among others. The title itself, “Calls,” suggests more than one cry, and by the end the poem has gathered the flamingo, the hawk, and the warbler into a kind of chorus.
The imagery is precise and sensory. “Flame flamingo” fuses color and heat, making the bird’s call feel bright and insistent. The “spotted hawk” brings a sharper, more solitary kind of hunger, while the warblers add motion and community in the dusk. These are not decorative birds; each one embodies a different urgency. The key word “waiting” appears three times in the final movement: “i am waiting, / waiting with the flame flamingo, / the spotted hawk, the running water / warbler — / waiting for you.” That repetition slows the poem down, holding the reader inside the speaker’s patience.
What makes the poem significant is its quiet transformation of longing into solidarity. The speaker does not wait alone; he waits “with” the flamingo, the hawk, and the warbler. Human desire, Sandburg suggests, belongs to a larger pattern of voices reaching toward something absent or returning. The unnamed “you” could be a lover, a friend, or even some sense of home, but the poem keeps that figure open, allowing the reader to enter the address. In an era of modernism often associated with fragmentation and irony, “Calls” finds a gentle alternative: a free-verse lyric that is direct, accessible, and emotionally warm without becoming vague. Its significance lies in that balance—Sandburg makes nature feel less like a backdrop and more like a companion in the long work of waiting.