Dreams poems
/ page 217 of 232 /
Southern Pacific
© Carl Sandburg
HUNTINGTON sleeps in a house six feet long.
Huntington dreams of railroads he built and owned.
Huntington dreams of ten thousand men saying: Yes, sir.
Sleepyheads
© Carl Sandburg
SLEEP is a maker of makers. Birds sleep. Feet cling to a perch. Look at the balance. Let the legs loosen, the backbone untwist, the head go heavy over, the whole works tumbles a done bird off the perch.
Fox cubs sleep. The pointed head curls round into hind legs and tail. It is a ball of red hair. It is a muff waiting. A wind might whisk it in the air across pastures and rivers, a cocoon, a pod of seeds. The snooze of the black nose is in a circle of red hair.
Sixteen Months
© Carl Sandburg
ON the lips of the child Janet float changing dreams.
It is a thin spiral of blue smoke,
A morning campfire at a mountain lake.
Shenandoah
© Carl Sandburg
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, its 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.
Prairie
© Carl Sandburg
I WAS born on the prairie and the milk of its wheat, the red of its clover, the eyes of its women, gave me a song and a slogan.
Here the water went down, the icebergs slid with gravel, the gaps and the valleys hissed, and the black loam came, and the yellow sandy loam.
Here between the sheds of the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians, here now a morning star fixes a fire sign over the timber claims and cow pastures, the corn belt, the cotton belt, the cattle ranches.
Portrait of a Motor Car
© Carl Sandburg
ITS a lean car
a long-legged dog of a car
a gray-ghost eagle car.
The feet of it eat the dirt of a road
the wings of it eat the hills.
Danny the driver dreams of it when he sees women in red skirts and red sox in his sleep.
It is in Dannys life and runs in the blood of him
a lean gray-ghost car.
Pick Offs
© Carl Sandburg
THE TELESCOPE picks off star dust
on the clean steel sky and sends it to me.
The telephone picks off my voice and
Momus
© Carl Sandburg
Momus is the name men give your face,
The brag of its tone, like a long low steamboat whistle
Finding a way mid mist on a shoreland,
Where gray rocks let the salt water shatter spray
Against horizons purple, silent.
Letters To Dead Imagists
© Carl Sandburg
EMILY DICKINSON:
You gave us the bumble bee who has a soul,
The everlasting traveler among the hollyhocks,
And how God plays around a back yard garden.
Killers
© Carl Sandburg
I AM singing to you
Soft as a man with a dead child speaks;
Hard as a man in handcuffs,
Held where he cannot move:
In Tall Grass
© Carl Sandburg
BEES and a honeycomb in the dried head of a horse in a pasture cornera skull in the tall grass and a buzz and a buzz of the yellow honey-hunters.
And I ask no better a winding sheet
(over the earth and under the sun.)
Grieg Being Dead
© Carl Sandburg
GRIEG being dead we may speak of him and his art.
Grieg being dead we can talk about whether he was any good or not.
Grieg being with Ibsen, Björnson, Lief Ericson and the rest,
Grieg being dead does not care a hells hoot what we say.
Fire-Logs
© Carl Sandburg
NANCY HANKS dreams by the fire;
Dreams, and the logs sputter,
And the yellow tongues climb.
Red lines lick their way in flickers.
Fire Dreams
© Carl Sandburg
I REMEMBER here by the fire,
In the flickering reds and saffrons,
They came in a ramshackle tub,
Pilgrims in tall hats,
Early Moon
© Carl Sandburg
THE BABY moon, a canoe, a silver papoose canoe, sails and sails in the Indian west.
A ring of silver foxes, a mist of silver foxes, sit and sit around the Indian moon.
One yellow star for a runner, and rows of blue stars for more runners, keep a line of watchers.
O foxes, baby moon, runners, you are the panel of memory, fire-white writing to-night of the Red Mans dreams.
Dusty Doors
© Carl Sandburg
CHILD of the Aztec gods,
how long must we listen here,
how long before we go?
Dunes
© Carl Sandburg
WHAT do we see here in the sand dunes of the white
moon alone with our thoughts, Bill,
Alone with our dreams, Bill, soft as the women tying
scarves around their heads dancing,
Drumnotes
© Carl Sandburg
DAYS of the dead men, Danny.
Drum for the dead, drum on your
remembering heart.
