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Contemplative, Carl Sandburg, in English Clear filters

ContemplativeCarl Sandburg

Two Neighbors

Faces of two eternities keep looking at me. One is Omar Khayam and the red stuff wherein men forget yesterday and to-morrow and remember only the voices and songs, the stories, newspapers and fights of today. One is Louis Cornaro and a slim trick of slow, short meals across slow, short years, letting Death open the door only in slow, short inches. I have a neighbor who swears by Omar. I have a neighbor who swears by Cornaro. Both are happy. Faces of two eternities keep looking at me. Let them look.
ContemplativeCarl Sandburg

A Coin

Your western heads here cast on money, You are the two that fade away together, Partners in the mist. Lunging buffalo shoulder. Lean Indian face, We who come after where you are gone Salute your forms on the new nickel. You are To us: The past. Runners On the prairie: Good-by.
ContemplativeCarl Sandburg

Limited

I AM riding on a limited express, one of the crack trains of the nation. Hurtling across the prairie into blue haze and dark air go fifteen all-steel coaches holding a thousand people. (All the coaches shall be scrap and rust and all the men and women laughing in the diners and sleepers shall pass to ashes.) I ask a man in the smoker where he is going and he answers : " Omaha."
ContemplativeCarl Sandburg

To Certain Journeymen

Undertakers, hearse drivers, grave diggers, I speak to you as one not afraid of your business. You handle dust going to a long country, You know the secret behind your job is the same whether you lower the coffin with modern, automatic machinery, well-oiled and noiseless, or whether the body is laid in by naked hands and then covered by the shovels. Your day's work is done with laughter many days of the year, And you earn a living by those who say good-by today in thin whispers.
ContemplativeCarl Sandburg

Cumulatives

Storms have beaten on this point of land And ships gone to wreck here and the passers-by remember it with talk on the deck at night as they near it. Fists have beaten on the face of this old prize-fighter And his battles have held the sporting pages and on the street they indicate him with their right fore-finger as one who once wore a championship belt. A hundred stories have been published and a thousand rumored About why this tall dark man has divorced two beautiful young women And married a third who resembles the first two and they shake their heads and say, " There he
ContemplativeCarl Sandburg

Personality

Musings of a Police Reporter in the Identification Bureau You have loved forty women, but you have only one thumb. You have led a hundred secret lives, but you mark only one thumb. You go round the world and fight in a thousand wars and win all the world's honors, but when you come back home the print of the one thumb your mother gave you is the same print of thumb you had in the old home when your mother kissed you and said good-by. Out of the whirling womb of time come millions of men and their feet crowd the earth and they cut one anothers' throats for room to stand and among them all are not two thumbs alike.
ContemplativeCarl Sandburg

Working Girls

The working girls in the morning are going to work — long lines of them afoot amid the downtown stores and factories, thousands with little brick-shaped lunches wrapped in newspapers under their arms. Each morning as I move through this river of youngwoman life I feel a wonder about where it is all going, so many with a peach bloom of young years on them and laughter of red lips and memories in their eyes of dances the night before and plays and walks. Green and gray streams run side by side in a river and so here are always the others, those who have been over the way, the women who know each one the end of life's gamble for her, the meaning and the clew, the how and the why of the dances and the
ContemplativeCarl Sandburg

Muckers

Twenty men stand watching the muckers. Stabbing the sides of the ditch Where clay gleams yellow, Driving the blades of their shovels Deeper and deeper for the new gas mains, Wiping sweat off their faces With red bandanas. The muckers work on . . pausing . . to pull Their boots out of suckholes where they slosh. Of the twenty looking on Ten murmur, "O, it's a hell of a job," Ten others, "Jesus, I wish I had the job."
ContemplativeCarl Sandburg

Picnic Boat

Sunday night and the park policemen tell each other it is dark as a stack of black cats on Lake Michigan. A big picnic boat comes home to Chicago from the peach farms of Saugatuck. Hundreds of electric bulbs break the night's darkness, a flock of red and yellow birds with wings at a standstill. Running along the deck railings are festoons and leaping in curves are loops of light from prow and stern to the tall smokestacks. Over the hoarse crunch of waves at my pier comes a hoarse answer in the rhythmic oompa of the brasses playing a Polish folk-song for the home-comers.
ContemplativeCarl Sandburg

The Junk Man

I AM glad God saw Death And gave Death a job taking care of all who are tired of living: When all the wheels in a clock are worn and slow and the connections loose And the clock goes on ticking and telling the wrong time from hour to hour And people around the house joke about what a bum clock it is, How glad the clock is when the big Junk Man drives his wagon Up to the house and puts his arms around the clock and says: " You don't belong here, You gotta come Along with me,"

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