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Comfort To A Youth That Had Lost His Love
© Robert Herrick
What needs complaints,
When she a place
Has with the race
Of saints?
Why Flowers Change Colour
© Robert Herrick
These fresh beauties, we can prove,
Once were virgins, sick of love,
Turn'd to flowers: still in some,
Colours go and colours come.
California Plush
© Frank Bidart
is the Hollywood Freeway at midnight, windows down and
radio blaring
bearing right into the center of the city, the Capitol Tower
on the right, and beyond it, Hollywood Boulevard
blazing
Herbert White
© Frank Bidart
and then I did it to her a couple of times,--
but it was funny,--afterwards,
it was as if somebody else did it ...
Smoke and Steel
© Carl Sandburg
SMOKE of the fields in spring is one,
Smoke of the leaves in autumn another.
Smoke of a steel-mill roof or a battleship funnel,
They all go up in a line with a smokestack,
Silver Wind
© Carl Sandburg
DO you know how the dream looms? how if summer misses one of us the two of us miss summer
Summer when the lungs of the earth take a long breath for the change to low contralto singing mornings when the green corn leaves first break through the black loam
And another long breath for the silver soprano melody of the moon songs in the light nights when the earth is lighter than a feather, the iron mountains lighter than a goose down
So I shall look for you in the light nights then, in the laughter of slats of silver under a hill hickory.
In the listening tops of the hickories, in the wind motions of the hickory shingle leaves, in the imitations of slow sea water on the shingle silver in the wind
I shall look for you.
Silver Nails
© Carl Sandburg
A MAN was crucified. He came to the city a stranger,
was accused, and nailed to a cross. He lingered hanging.
Laughed at the crowd. "The nails are iron," he
said, "You are cheap. In my country when we crucify
Savoir Faire
© Carl Sandburg
CAST a bronze of my head and legs and put them on the kings street.
Set the cast of me here alongside Carl XII, making two Carls for the Swedish people and the utlanders to look at between the palace and the Grand Hotel.
The summer sun will shine on both the Carls, and November drizzles wrap the two, one in tall leather boots, one in wool leggins.
Also I place it in the record: the Swedish people may name boats after me or change the name of a long street and give it one of my nicknames.
North Atlantic
© Carl Sandburg
WHEN the sea is everywhere
from horizon to horizon ..
when the salt and blue
fill a circle of horizons ..
Medallion
© Carl Sandburg
THE BRASS medallion profile of your face I keep always.
It is not jingling with loose change in my pockets.
It is not stuck up in a show place on the office wall.
I carry it in a special secret pocket in the day
Leather Leggings
© Carl Sandburg
THEY have taken the ball of earth
and made it a little thing.
They were held to the land and horses;
Last Answers
© Carl Sandburg
I wrote a poem on the mist
And a woman asked me what I meant by it.
I had thought till then only of the beauty of the mist,
how pearl and gray of it mix and reel,
And change the drab shanties with lighted lamps at evening
into points of mystery quivering with color.
Kin
© Carl Sandburg
BROTHER, I am fire
Surging under the ocean floor.
I shall never meet you, brother--
Not for years, anyhow;
Evening Waterfall
© Carl Sandburg
WHAT was the name you called me?
And why did you go so soon?
The crows lift their caw on the wind,
Crimson Changes People
© Carl Sandburg
DID I see a crucifix in your eyes
and nails and Roman soldiers
and a dusk Golgotha?
Nights Nothings Again
© Carl Sandburg
WHO knows what I know
when I have asked the night questions
and the night has answered nothing
only the old answers?
Humdrum
© Carl Sandburg
IF I had a million lives to live
and a million deaths to die
in a million humdrum worlds,
Id like to change my name
Dream Girl
© Carl Sandburg
YOU will come one day in a waver of love,
Tender as dew, impetuous as rain,
The tan of the sun will be on your skin,
The purr of the breeze in your murmuring speech,
You will pose with a hill-flower grace.
Off the Turnpike
© Amy Lowell
Good ev'nin', Mis' Priest.
I jest stepped in to tell you Good-bye.
Yes, it's all over.
All my things is packed
The Book of Hours of Sister Clotilde
© Amy Lowell
The Bell in the convent tower swung.
High overhead the great sun hung,
A navel for the curving sky.
The air was a blue clarity.
