Authors: Carl Sandburg
    into a crimson target?”
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Daybreak creeps
in a first thin shimmering.
Neither is the day come
nor the night gone.
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Be shabbawobba now
before this pool of day to come.
    Speak and be still.
    Listen and be still.
A ring of topaz floats in rose-light.
Handles of moongold go in a hush.
The pool welcomes a pair of orange slippers,
the gauze of them winking out and coming back.
Come passwords, come numerals,
                come changing altar lights.
Fingers, be cool, strum only half-heard chords.
Let your words be softer than
Thou Art Like a Flowera slow south wind blowing thistledown.
“Thou art like a flower,”
Ran an old song line.
What flower did he mean?
She might have been a quiet blue flower.
She wore crimson carnations perhaps.
She may have planted tall sunflowers
Stooping with hollyhocks around a kitchen doorstep.
They may have picked bluebells together
Or talked about wild arbutus they found.
Perhaps she knew what he meant by telling her:
“Thou art like a flower.”
Time was. Time is. Time shall be.
Man invented time to be used.
Love was. Love is. Love shall be.
Yet man never invented love
Nor is love to be used like time.
A clock wears numbers one to twelve
And you look and read its face
And tell the time pre-cise-ly ex-act-ly.
Yet who reads the face of love?
Who tells love numbers pre-cisely ex-act-ly?
Holding love in a tight hold for keeps.
Fastening love down and saying
“It's here now and here for always.”
You don't do this offhand, careless-like.
Love costs. Love is not so easy
Nor is the shimmering of star dust
Nor the smooth flow of new blossoms
Nor the drag of a heavy hungering for someone,
Love is a white horse you ride
or wheels and hammers leaving you lonely
or a rock in the moonlight for rest
or a sea where phantom ships cross always
or a tall shadow always whispering
or a circle of spray and prismsâ
maybe a rainbow round your shoulder.
    Heavy heavy is love to carry
    and light as one rose petal,
    light as a bubble, a blossom,
    a remembering bar of music
    or a finger or a wisp of hair
Rose Bawn    never forgotten.
She believed herself to have gone through tall gateways and to have marched triumphant across fire and thorn. She sat in front of a county building, under a mulberry, and once she mumbled to an invisible Irish sweetheart, “All the knocking of the tumblers of the sea is in my knee bones.”
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When the chariots of thunder drove and rolled overhead, she mumbled, “When the water comes through the sieve of the sky, that makes the rainâGod does it easyâGod does all things easy.”
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SpeechMemories swept over her like a strong wind on dark waters. She half-whispered, “When the moongold came on the water afterward it was too much moneyâtoo much by farâmore than we wanted.”
There was
what we call “words,”
a lot of language,
syllables,
each syllable made of air.
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Then there was
s i l e n c e ,
no talk at all,
no more syllables
shaped by living tongues
out of wandering air.
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Thus all tongues
slowly talk themselves
into s i l e n c e .
The smoke of these landscapes has gone God knows
where.
The sun touches them off with shot gold of an evening,
with a mother's grey eyes singing to her children.
The blue smudge on a haystack a mile off is gone God
knows where.
The yellow dust of a sheet over Emil Hawkinson's
cornfield,
The ribbons of red picked at by the high-flying
hard-crying crows,
These too are in the pits of the west God knows where.
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A delphinium flings a shadow
with a rooted stalkâ
a personal shadow.
Each silhouette documents
designs and dooms woven
between shape and shadowshape.
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You may add two delphiniums
with seeds lighted in soil
with stalks prepared in loam
toward the upheave into bloom
when stalk and leaves find a path
hold a rocketform of blue
hold it in a velvet stillstand.
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In a summer daybreak rain
a huddle of delphiniums
across spikes of fogblue leaves
out of little mistblue cups
trade meditations on being
shapes and shadowshapes.
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Cups and bells nod in the sun,
in the fine dust of the wind:
one newborn delphinium laughing
at the long scroll of marriages
whereby she is the latest child
bringing to the bright air her shape,
to the dark earth her shadow.
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Shaded out of seven prisms
in choices by living fingers
out of the rainbow end?
Yes and the winds
of many evenings came:
dawns drew in with dew and mist
and the bells of many rains rang.
    Soft and lovely
    these transients go yet stay
Sun Dancer    Even their violence goes in velvet.
Spider, you have long silver legs.
You may spin diagrams of doom.
Your patterns may throw fine glints
Festooned from wandering silk.
It may be neither art nor money
Nor calisthenics nor engineering.
No man trusts any woman and vice versa.
All men love all women and vice versa.
And all friends cherish each other.
And there are triflers who flirt with death.
Spider, you have long silver legs.
A blue shot dawn,
A white shot dawn,
And she went out.
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Into the dawn water
Until the dawn water
Came over her head.
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And she came back
Out of the water
Into a blue shot dawn,
Into a white shot dawn.
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The trucks and the cavalry came,
The shoes and the wheels, the tarpaulins
dripping.
And the shadows of the grain elevators
In the hump of the blown white moon,
And the breathing of the tugs and barges
In the change of the fog river grayâ
These all crossed over; the day after they
stood up; the day after was something
Two Fishelse again.
when the two fish spoke
their speech was scarlet
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they met in a bowl
of molten gold air
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they swung in an arch
of seven rainbow sheens
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they swam in a grotto
one of a thousand grottoes
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they shook their fins
Smoke Shapesin a green feather dust
Egg Faces
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Lights of egg faces, lights of monkey skulls,
meet each other, meet yourselves.
Lights of the morning sun warming the night-
wet wood, fires of far-back mornings fixing
your caldrons cooling to firestone,
meet each other, meet yourselves.
Sheet white egg faces, strong and sad gorilla
mugs, meet yourselves, meet each other.
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Long Heads
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Sleep, long-face of the long-head family.
Go back to the inside of the ten thousandth
mountain you came from.
Out of sleep you came; back to sleep you go.
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Eyes out of morning twilights, how now it is easy
to join up with evening twilights.
Nose cut from the spear handle of a morning star
finding its mirror-slant in a mountain rock nose,
how now it is easy to sit next and alongside an
evening star spear handle.
Yearn, too; you might as well yearn; yearners or
not, out of sleep, back to sleep; this is put on
the mouth.
Sleep, long-face, back now to the inside of the
ten thousandth mountain.
Three shrines a woman has for a man.
She loves him for what he is out in the world.
She loves him for what he seems to her of which
the world knows nothing.
She loves him for the touch of his personal
magnets.
Thus we might frame these three declarations and
listen to bystanders:
    Is that so?
    Who told youâa little bird?
    What are these personal magnets?
    What is a shrine?
    You mean she never opened
Variations on a Theme     a barrel of snakes for him?
She was given crystal flesh for a home.
And her windows were tremulous to visions.
Love me, love me, was her often cry.
She put lover higher than all else.
She carried series of love-birds and gave away.
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                Pour love deep into me.
                Thus ran her cry.
                Let me have all love.
                She murmured this want.
                Love may be toil, waste, death
                Yet come pour love deep into me.
Timesweep                Thus her years ran to one theme.
I was born in the morning of the world,
So I know how morning looks,
morning in the valley wanting,
morning on a mountain wanting.
Morning looks like people look,
like a cornfield wanting corn,
like a sea wanting ships.
Tell me about any strong beautiful wanting
And there is your morning, my morning,
    everybody's morning.
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Makers and givers may be moon shaken,
                may be star lost,
Knowing themselves as sea-deep seekers,
                both seeking and sought,
Knowing love is a ring and the ring endless,
Seeing love as a wheel and the wheel endless.
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Love may be a hard flesh crying its want.
Love may be a thin horizon air,
thinner than snowwhite wool finespun,
finer than any faint blue mist
blown away and gone on yesterday's wind.
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    There are hungers
    for a nameless bread
    out of the dust
    of the hard earth,
    out of the blaze
    of the calm sun.
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Blow now, winds, you so old at blowing.
Oat at the river, pine at the rocks,