Authors: Carl Sandburg
and a box-shaped world has comers
and a bag-shaped world is either open or closed,
and Somebody holds the bag.
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Now whether the world is oblong, square or rhomboid
or whether the world is a series of circles,
rings twisted into each other's eternal grooves,
or whether the world keeps changing from box to bag,
from corners to circles and back to corners,
from rings to oblongs and back to rings
and repeating the twist into the groove
and practicing that twist over again
from box to bag and bag again to boxâ
this was what we were talking about
when the first thunder crashed
and lightning forked across a black rain.
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We decided the earth itself isn't much.
It is mapped and measured now
And we fly around it in just a few breakfasts.
And the strong man they named Atlas
Should have had that very name of Atlas
If he had stood under the earth ball
And held it on his big shoulders;
Atlas, you were made as a make-believe
And we give you a make-believe salute.
We say: Atlas, how are you doing,
    how have you been?
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Beyond the ball of earth are other balls,
also double balls, triple balls, series of balls,
and balloons, drums, cylinders, triangles, jugs,
some with handles identified and signed,
others with anonymous sprockets and axlesâ
and we decided amid the sheet lightningâ
the whole works is held either in a box or a bag,
afterwards asking ourselves:
what is outside the box, what props up the bag?
these are big questions, we told each other
while sprags of lightning dropped from the skyâ
clutches and magnets, clocks and wheels
made of a mud and air beyond our dreams,
ordered in verbs beyond our doorways.
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We decided at last
the world might be a box when awake
and a bag when asleep
and while we slept
it changed from box to bag
and back from bag to box
and the forgetfulness of our own sleep
is strange and beautiful by itself
and sometimes in its shifting shapes
the world is a cradle dedicated to sleep
and what would you rather have than sleep?
The laws of the bronze gods
are irrevocable.
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And yetâin the statue of
General Grant astride a horse
on rolling prairie, on little
hills looking from Lincoln
Park at Lake Michiganâ
here the sparrows have a nest
in General Grant's spy glassâ
here the sparrows have rented
a flat in General Grant's
right stirrupâ
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It is true? The laws of the
bronze gods are irrevocable?
Elm buds are out.
Yesterday morning, last night,
they crept out.
They are the mice of early
spring air.
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To the north is the gray sky.
Winter hung it gray for the gray
elm to stand dark against.
Now the branches all end with the
yellow and gold mice of early
spring air.
They are moving mice creeping out
Child Facewith leaf and leaf.
There are lips as strange and soft
As a rim of moon many miles off.
White on a fading purple sea.
“Was it there, far-off, real,
Or did my eyes play me a trick?”
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A finger can be laid across it,
Laid on a little mouth's white yearning,
Only as a white rim of moon
Can be picked off a blue sea
And sent in a love letter.
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Once a child face lay in the moonight
Of an early spring night.
Birth is the starting point of passion.
Passion is the beginning of death.
How can you turn back from birth?
How can you say no to passion?
How can you bid death hold off?
And if thoughts come and hold you
And if dreams step in and shake your bones
What can you do but take them and make them
more your own?
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Of course, a nickel is a nickel,
and a dime is a dimeâsureâ
we learned thatâ
why mention it now?
of course, steel is steel;
and a hammer is a hammer;
And a thought, a dream, is more than a name,
a number, a fixed point.
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***
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Walk in a midnight fog now and say to it: Tell
me your number and I'll tell mine.
Salute one morning sun falling on a river ribbon
of mist and tell it: My number is such-and-
suchâwhat's yours?
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Of what is fog the starting point?
Of what is the red sun the beginning?
Long agoâas nowâlittle men and women knew in
their bones the singing and the aching of
Evening Questionsthese stumbling questions.
The swath of light climbs up the skyscraper
Around the corners of white prisms and spikes.
The inside torso stands up in a plug of gun-metal.
The shadow struggles to get loose from the light.
Shall I say I'm through and it's no use?
Or have I got another good fight in me?
What is there for us two
to split fifty-fifty,
to go halvers on?
A Bible, a deck of cards?
a farm, a frying pan?
a porch, front steps to sit on?
How can we be pals
when you speak English
and I speak English
and you never understand me
Evening Sea Windand I never understand you?
A molten gold flows away from the sun
to fall as a shingle of gold and glass
on waters holding five ships, a quintet,
five, no less, five sheathed in brass haze.
On a bronze and copper path just over
comes a maroon, comes a dusk of gun-metal.
A white horse shape of a moving cloud
meets a wind changing it to a small lamb,
meets a wind smoothing what it meets,
smoothing the lamb into six white snakes,
smoothing the snakes to a ball of wool.
The sungold shingle, ships in brass haze
fade into walls of umber, pools of ink
and there is abbadabra and abracadabra.
Two smoke rings, two nightmist bracelets
seem to be telling us and themselves:
   “We blend and go, then again
Forgotten Wars    blend and go.”
Be loose. Be easy. Be ready.
Forget the last war.
Forget the one before.
Forget the one yet to come.
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Be loose and easy about the wars
whether they have been fought
or whether yet to be foughtâ
be ready to forget them.
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Who was saying at high noon today:
“Is not each of them a forgotten war
after it is fought and over?
how and why it came forgotten?
how and what it cost forgotten?”
and was he there at Iwo Jima, Okinawa
or places named Cassino, Anzio, the Bulge?
and saying now:
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“Let the next war before it comes
and before it gets under way
and five or six days sees its finish
or fifty years sees it still going strong
âlet it be now a forgotten war.
Be ready now to forget it.
Be loose, be easy now.
The next war goes over in a flashâor runs long.”
God gets up in the morning
and says, “Another day?”
God goes to work every day
at regular hours.
God is no gentleman for God
puts on overalls and gets
dirty running the universe we know
about and several other universes
Hunger and Coldnobody knows about but Him.
Hunger long gone holds little heroic
to the hungering.
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You don't eat and you get so you don't
care to eat nor ever remember eatingâ
and hearing of people who eat or don't
eat is all the same to you when you've
learned to keep your mind off eating
and eaters.
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You become with enough hunger
the same as a tree with sap long gone
    or a dry leaf ready to fall.
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Cold is cold and too cold is too cold.
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The colder you get the more numb you get
and when you get numb enough you begin
to feel snug and cozy with warmth.
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When the final numb glow of comfort goes
through you, then comes your slow smooth
slide into being frozen stiff and stark.
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Then comes your easy entry at the tall
gates beyond which you are proof against
    ice or fire
    or tongues of malice
    or itch of ambition
or any phase of the peculiar torment known
Foxgloves    as unrequited love.
Your heart was handed over
to the foxgloves one hot summer afternoon.
The snowsilk buds nodded and hung drowsy.
So the stalks believed
As they held those buds above.
In deep wells of white
The dark fox fingers go in these gloves.
In a slow fold of summer
Your heart was handed over in a curve
Harvestfrom bud to bloom.
When the corn stands yellow in September,
A red flower ripens and shines among the stalks
And a red silk creeps among the broad ears
And tall tassels lift over all else
                and keep a singing
                to the prairies
                and the wind.
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          They are the grand lone ones
          For they are never saved
                along with the corn:
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                They are cut down
                and piled high
                and burned.
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                Their fire
Fame If Not Fortune                lights the west in November.
A half-dollar in the hand of a gypsy
tells me this and more:
You shall go broken on the wheel,
lashed to the bars and fates of steel,
a nickel's worth of nothing,
a vaudeville gag,
a child's busted rubber balloon kicked
    amid dirty bunting and empty popcorn
    bags at a summer park.
Yet cigarmakers shall name choice Havanas and
paste your picture on the box,
Racehorses foaming under scarlet and ochre jockeys
shall wear your name,
And policemen direct strangers to parks and schools
Impasseremembered after you.
Bring on a pail of smoke.
Bring on a sieve of coffee.
Bring on shovels speaking Javanese.
Open your newest, latest handkerchief
And let down a red-mouthed hankering hippopotamus.
Perform for us these offertories in blue.
Tell us again: Nothing is impossible.
We listen while you tell us.
Apes, may I speak to you a moment?
Chimpanzees, come hither for words.
Orangoutangs, let's get into a huddle.
Baboons, lemme whisper in your ears.
Gorillas, do yuh hear me hollerin' to yuh?
And monkeys! monkeys! get this chatterâ
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For a long time men have plucked letters