Les plus lus ▸
Carl Sandburg
Dreams in the dusk,
Only dreams closing the day
And with the day's close going back
To the gray things, the dark things.
The far, deep things of dreamland.
Dreams, only dreams in the dusk,
Only the old remembered pictures
Of lost days when the day's loss
Wrote in tears the heart's loss.
Tears and loss and broken dreams
May find your heart at dusk.
I CANNOT see your face.
When I think of you.
It is your hands which I see.
Your hands
Sewing,
Holding a book.
Resting for a moment on the sill of a window.
My eyes keep always the sight of your hands.
But my heart holds the sound of your voice.
And the soft brightness which is your soul.
I learned -- at least -- what Home could be --
How ignorant I had been
Of pretty ways of Covenant --
How awkward at the Hymn
Round our new Fireside -- but for this --
This pattern -- of the Way --
Whose Memory drowns me, like the Dip
Of a Celestial Sea --
What Mornings in our Garden -- guessed --
What Bees -- for us -- to hum --
With only Birds to interrupt
The Ripple of our Theme --
And Task for Both --
When Play be done --
Your Problem -- of the Brain --
And mine -- some foolisher effect --
THERE once the walls
Of the ruined cottage stood.
The periwinkle crawls
With flowers in its hair into the wood.
In flowerless hours
Never will the bank fail,
With everlasting flowers
On fragments of blue plates, to tell the tale.
This evening I walk the streets
hand in hand with my grief.
I have left, locked in my house,
my disabled memories
and my crazy dreams.
So, the streets, my grief, and I
are ruling the world tonight.
Oh, you cannot imagine
how relaxed this walk is,
without those foolish memories
and those mad dreams.
It happened years ago,
I left.
After I walked just two or three steps,
I heard the door
anxiously being closed.
I don’t know why
but ever since that moment
the sound that the door made
echoes in my ears
like the clatter of a handful of pebbles
on a coffin.
I started to hate the closure of doors.
To me they sound like coffin lids.
If only this fear would leave me I could dream of Crickley Hill
And a hundred thousand thoughts of home would visit my heart in sleep;
But here the peace is shattered all day by the devil’s will,
And the guns bark night-long to spoil the velvet silence deep.
O who could think that once we drank in quiet inns and cool
And saw brown oxen trooping the dry sands to slake
Their thirst at the river flowing, or plunged in a silver pool
To shake the sleepy drowse off before well awake?
We are stale here, we are covered body and soul and mind
With mire of the trenches, close clinging and foul.
We have left our old inheritance, our Paradise behind,
And clarity is lost to us and cleanness of soul.
My days are like sands; colourless,
Each matched to each, unerringly
They drift. The salt bleach of a sea
Has washed them clean and lustreless;
The teeth of rock on ragged strands
Have ground them to an even grey,
And one wind blows them a one way.
But Oh, the slow making of sands.
All is here; forgotten things
Mix with the unforgettable.
Granite blends with tinted shell.
And nothing so stable that it clings
To its stability. Had there
Been more of marble, more of gold.
The sands would hide in their grim hold
Nothing more wise, nothing more fair.
The breaking dead leaves 'neath my feet
A plaintive melody repeat,
Recalling shattered hopes that lie
As relics of a bygone sky.
Again I thread the mazy past,
Back where the mounds are scattered fast -
Oh! foolish tears, why do you start,
To break of dead leaves in the heart?
How does it happen, tell me,
That I who was most erudite of lawyers,
Who knew Blackstone and Coke
Almost by heart, who made the greatest speech
The court-house ever heard, and wrote
A brief that won the praise of Justice Breese
How does it happen, tell me,
That I lie here unmarked, forgotten,
While Chase Henry, the town drunkard,
Has a marble block, topped by an urn
Wherein Nature, in a mood ironical,
Has sown a flowering weed?
In the Shenandoah Valley, one rider gray and one rider
blue, and the sun on the riders wondering.
Piled in the Shenandoah, riders blue and riders gray,
piled with shovels, one and another, dust in the
Shenandoah taking them quicker than mothers take
children done with play.
The blue nobody remembers, the gray nobody remembers,
it's all old and old nowadays in the Shenandoah.
And all is young, a butter of dandelions slung on the
turf, climbing blue flowers of the wishing woodlands
wondering: a midnight purple violet claims the sun
among old heads, among old dreams of repeating
heads of a rider blue and a rider gray in the
Shenandoah.
Before me lies a mass of shapeless days,
Unseparated atoms, and I must
Sort them apart and live them. Sifted dust
Covers the formless heap. Reprieves, delays,
There are none, ever. As a monk who prays
The sliding beads asunder, so I thrust
Each tasteless particle aside, and just
Begin again the task which never stays.
And I have known a glory of great suns,
When days flashed by, pulsing with joy and fire!
Drunk bubbled wine in goblets of desire,
And felt the whipped blood laughing as it runs!
Spilt is that liquor, my too hasty hand
Threw down the cup, and did not understand.