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. Yes, Momus, Men have flung your face in bronze To gaze in gargoyle downward on a street-whirl of folk. They were artists did this, shaped your sad mouth, Gave you a tall forehead slanted with calm, broad wisdom; All your lips to the corners and your cheeks to the high bones Thrown over and through with a smile that forever wishes and wishes, purple, silent, fled from all the iron things of life, evaded like a sought bandit, gone into dreams, by God. I wonder, Momus, Whether shadows of the dead sit somewhere and look with deep laughter On men who play in terrible earnest the old, known, solemn repetitions of history. A droning monotone soft as sea laughter hovers from your kindliness of bronze, You give me the human ease of a mountain peak, purple, silent; Granite shoulders heaving above the earth curves, Careless eye-witness of the spawning tides of men and women Swarming always in a drift of millions to the dust of toil, the salt of tears, And blood drops of undiminishing war.

Desolate and lone All night long on the lake Where fog trails and mist creeps, The whistle of a boat Calls and cries unendingly, Like some lost child In tears and trouble Hunting the harbor's breast And the harbor's eyes.

(We can succeed only by concert. . . . The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves. . . . December 1, 1862. The President’s Message to Congress.) Be sad, be cool, be kind, remembering those now dreamdust hallowed in the ruts and gullies, solemn bones under the smooth blue sea, faces warblown in a falling rain. Be a brother, if so can be, to those beyond battle fatigue each in his own corner of earth or forty fathoms undersea beyond all boom of guns, beyond any bong of a great bell, each with a bosom and number, each with a pack of secrets, each with a personal dream and doorway and over them now the long endless winds with the low healing song of time, the hush and sleep murmur of time. Make your wit a guard and cover. Sing low, sing high, sing wide. Let your laughter come free remembering looking toward peace: “We must disenthrall ourselves.” Be a brother, if so can be, to those thrown forward for taking hardwon lines, for holding hardwon points and their reward so-so, little they care to talk about, their pay held in a mute calm, highspot memories going unspoken, what they did being past words, what they took being hardwon. Be sad, be kind, be cool. Weep if you must And weep open and shameless before these altars. There are wounds past words. There are cripples less broken than many who walk whole. There are dead youths with wrists of silence who keep a vast music under their shut lips, what they did being past words, their dreams like their deaths beyond any smooth and easy telling, having given till no more to give. There is dust alive with dreams of The Republic, with dreams of the Family of Man flung wide on a shrinking globe with old timetables, old maps, old guide-posts torn into shreds, shot into tatters burnt in a firewind, lost in the shambles, faded in rubble and ashes. There is dust alive. Out of a granite tomb, Out of a bronze sarcophagus, Loose from the stone and copper Steps a whitesmoke ghost Lifting an authoritative hand In the name of dreams worth dying for, In the name of men whose dust breathes of those dreams so worth dying for, what they did being past words, beyond all smooth and easy telling. Be sad, be kind, be cool, remembering, under God, a dreamdust hallowed in the ruts and gullies, solemn bones under the smooth blue sea, faces warblown in a falling rain. Sing low, sing high, sing wide. Make your wit a guard and cover. Let your laughter come free like a help and a brace of comfort. The earth laughs, the sun laughs over every wise harvest of man, over man looking toward peace by the light of the hard old teaching: “We must disenthrall ourselves.”

T HERE are no handles upon a language Whereby men take hold of it And mark it with signs for its remembrance. It is a river, this language, Once in a thousand years Breaking a new course Changing its way to the ocean. It is mountain effluvia Moving to valleys And from nation to nation Crossing borders and mixing. Languages die like rivers. Words wrapped round your tongue today And broken to shape of thought Between your teeth and lips speaking Now and today Shall be faded hieroglyphics Ten thousand years from now. Sing—and singing—remember Your song dies and changes And is not here to-morrow Any more than the wind Blowing ten thousand years ago.

In Abraham Lincoln’s city, Where they remember his lawyer’s shingle, The place where they brought him Wrapped in battle flags, Wrapped in the smoke of memories From Tallahassee to the Yukon, The place now where the shaft of his tomb Points white against the blue prairie dome, In Abraham Lincoln’s city ... I saw knucks In the window of Mister Fischman’s second-hand store On Second Street. I went in and asked, “How much?” “Thirty cents apiece,” answered Mister Fischman. And taking a box of new ones off a shelf He filled anew the box in the showcase And said incidentally, most casually And incidentally: “I sell a carload a month of these.” I slipped my fingers into a set of knucks, Cast-iron knucks molded in a foundry pattern, And there came to me a set of thoughts like these: Mister Fischman is for Abe and the “malice to none” stuff, And the street car strikers and the strike-breakers, And the sluggers, gunmen, detectives, policemen, Judges, utility heads, newspapers, priests, lawyers, They are all for Abe and the “malice to none” stuff. I started for the door. “Maybe you want a lighter pair,” Came Mister Fischman’s voice. I opened the door ... and the voice again: “You are a funny customer.” Wrapped in battle flags, Wrapped in the smoke of memories, This is the place they brought him, This is Abraham Lincoln's home town.

Your bow swept over a string, and a long low note quivered to the air. (A mother of Bohemia sobs over a new child perfect learning to suck milk.) Your bow ran fast over all the high strings fluttering and wild. (All the girls in Bohemia are laughing on a Sunday afternoon in the hills with their lovers.)

I am the people—the mob—the crowd—the mass. Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me? I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world’s food and clothes. I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons come from me and the Lincolns. They die. And then I send forth more Napoleons and Lincolns. I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me. I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted. I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and makes me work and give up what I have. And I forget. Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red drops for history to remember. Then—I forget. When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer forget who robbed me last year, who played me for a fool—then there will be no speaker in all the world say the name: “The People,” with any fleck of a sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision. The mob—the crowd—the mass—will arrive then.

How much do you love me, a million bushels? Oh, a lot more than that, Oh, a lot more. And tomorrow maybe only half a bushel? Tomorrow maybe not even a half a bushel. And is this your heart arithmetic? This is the way the wind measures the weather.

I HEARD a woman's lips Speaking to a companion Say these words: "A woman what hustles Never keeps nothin' For all her hustlin'. Somebody always gets What she goes on the street for. If it ain't a pimp It's a bull what gets it. I been hustlin' now Till I ain't much good any more. I got nothin' to show for it. Some man got it all, Every night's hustlin' I ever did."

Passing through huddled and ugly walls, By doorways where women haggard Looked from their hunger-deep eyes, Haunted with shadows of hunger-hands, Out from the huddled and ugly walls, I came sudden, at the city's edge, On a blue burst of lake, Long lake waves breaking under the sun On a spray-flung curve of shore; And a fluttering storm of gulls, Masses of great gray wings And flying white bellies Veering and wheeling free in the open.