Section: «Poems»
Verse (ancient Greek ὁ στίχος — row, structure), a term in versification used in several meanings:
artistic speech organized by division into rhythmically commensurate segments; poetry in the narrow sense; in particular, it implies the properties of versification of a particular tradition ("antique verse", "Akhmatova's verse", etc.);
a line of poetic text organized according to a certain rhythmic pattern ("My uncle of the most honest rules").
Noon Hour
She sits in the dust at the wallsAnd makes cigars,Bending at the benchWith fingers wage-anxious,Changing her sweat for the day's pay.Now the noon..
© Carl Sandburg
Nocturne In A Deserted Brickyard
Stuff of the moonRuns on the lapping sandOut to the longest shadows.Under the curving willows,And round the creep of the wave line,Fluxions of yellow..
© Carl Sandburg
Nights Nothings Again
WHO knows what I knowwhen I have asked the night questionsand the night has answered nothingonly the old answers?Who picked a crimson cryptogram,the..
© Carl Sandburg
Night Stuff
LISTEN a while, the moon is a lovely woman, a lonely woman, lost in a silverdress, lost in a circus rider's silver dress.Listen a while, the lake by..
© Carl Sandburg
Night Movement-New York
IN the night, when the sea-winds take the city in their arms,And cool the loud streets that kept their dust noon and afternoon;In the night, when the..
© Carl Sandburg
Nigger
I am the nigger.Singer of songs,Dancer…Softer than fluff of cotton…Harder than dark earthRoads beaten in the sunBy the bare feet of slaves…Foam of..
© Carl Sandburg
New Feet
EMPTY battlefields keep their phantoms.Grass crawls over old gun wheelsAnd a nodding Canada thistle flings a purpleInto the summer's southwest..
© Carl Sandburg
New Farm Tractor
The rear axles hold the kick of twenty Missouri jackasses.It is in the records of the patent office and the ads there is twenty horse powerpull..
© Carl Sandburg
Never Born
THE TIME has gone by.The child is dead.The child was never even born.Why go on? Why so much as begin?How can we turn the clock back nowAnd not laugh..
© Carl Sandburg
Neighbors
On Forty-first Streetnear Eighth Avenuea frame house wobbles.If houses went on crutchesthis house would beone of the cripples.A sign on the..
© Carl Sandburg
Near Keokuk
THIRTY-TWO Greeks are dipping their feet in a creek.Sloshing their bare feet in a cool flow of clear water.All one midsummer day ten hours the..
© Carl Sandburg
My People
MY people are gray,pigeon gray, dawn gray, storm gray.I call them beautiful,and I wonder where they are going.
© Carl Sandburg
Murmurings In A Field Hospital
[They picked him up in the grass where he had lain twodays in the rain with a piece of shrapnel in his lungs.]Come to me only with playthings now. ...
© Carl Sandburg
Muckers
Twenty men stand watching the muckers.Stabbing the sides of the ditchWhere clay gleams yellow,Driving the blades of their shovelsDeeper and deeper..
© Carl Sandburg
Moonset
LEAVES of poplars pick Japanese prints against the west.Moon sand on the canal doubles the changing pictures.The moon's good-by ends pictures.The..
© Carl Sandburg
Monotone
The monotone of the rain is beautiful,And the sudden rise and slow relapseOf the long multitudinous rain.The sun on the hills is beautiful,Or a..
© Carl Sandburg
Monosyllabic
Let me be monosyllabic to-day, O Lord.Yesterday I loosed a snarl of words on a fool, on a child.To-day, let me be monosyllabic . . . . a crony of old..
© Carl Sandburg
Momus
Momus is the name men give your face,The brag of its tone, like a long low steamboat whistleFinding a way mid mist on a shoreland,Where gray rocks..
© Carl Sandburg
Mohammed Bek Hadjetlache
THIS Mohammedan colonel from the Caucasus yells with his voice and wigwagswith his arms.The interpreter translates, 'I was a friend of Kornilov, he..
© Carl Sandburg
Mist Forms
THE SHEETS of night mist travel a long valley.I know why you came at sundown in a scarf mist.What was it we touched asking nothing and asking all?How..
© Carl Sandburg
Mill-Doors
You never come back.I say good-by when I see you going in the doors,The hopeless open doors that call and waitAnd take you then for—how many cents a..
© Carl Sandburg
Memoranda
THIS handful of grass, brown, says little. This quarter mile field of it, wavingseeds ripening in the sun, is a lake of luminous firefly..
© Carl Sandburg
Memoir Of A Proud Boy
HE lived on the wings of storm.The ashes are in Chihuahua.Out of Ludlow and coal towns in ColoradoSprang a vengeance of Slav miners, Italians, Scots..
© Carl Sandburg
Medallion
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..
© Carl Sandburg
Maybe
Maybe he believes me, maybe not.Maybe I can marry him, maybe not.Maybe the wind on the prairie,The wind on the sea, maybe,Somebody, somewhere, maybe..
© Carl Sandburg