CARL SANDBURG
FOUR POEMS
BY CARL SANDBURG
INDEX
PENNSYLVANIA
HATS
BROKEN-FACE GARGOYLES
JAZZ FANTASIA
HATS
Hats, where do you belong?
what is under you?
On the rim of a skyscraper's forehead
I looked down and saw: hats: fifty thousand hats:
Swarming with a noise of bees and sheep, cattle and waterfalls,
Stopping with a silence of sea grass, a silence of prairie corn.
Hats : tell me your high hopes.
PENNSYLVANIA
I have been in Pennsylvania,
In the Monongahela and the Hocking Valleys.
In the blue Susquehanna
On a Saturday morning
I saw the mounted constabulary go by,
I saw boys playing marbles.
Spring and the hills laughed.
And in places
Along the Appalachian chain,
I saw steel arms handling coal and iron,
And I saw the white-cauliflower faces
Of miners' wives waiting for the men to come
home from the day's work.
I made colour studies in crimson and violet
Over the dust and domes of culm at sunset.
BROKEN-FACE GARGOYLES
All I can give you is broken-face gargoyles.
It is too early to sing and dance at funerals,
Though I can whisper to you I am looking for an undertaker humming a lullaby and throwing his feet in a swift and mystic buckand-wing, now you see it and now you don't.
Fish to swim a pool in your garden flashing a speckled silver,
A basket of wine-saps filling your room with flame-dark for your
eyes and the tang of valley orchards for your nose,
Such a beautiful pail of fish, such a beautiful peck of apples,
I cannot bring you now.
It is too early and I am not footloose yet.
I shall come in the night when I come with a hammer and saw.
I shall come near ...
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