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Carl Sandburg

Carl Sandburg

Bricklayer Love

I THOUGHT of killing myself because I am only a bricklayer and you a woman who loves the man who runs a drug store.  
 
I don’t care like I used to; I lay bricks straighter than I used to and I sing slower handling the trowel afternoons.  
 
When the sun is in my eyes and the ladders are shaky and the mortar boards go wrong, I think of you.

Cornhuskers. 1918.

#Americans #PulitzerPrice #XIXCentury #XXCentury

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Primer Lesson

Look out how you use proud words. When you let proud words go, it is… They wear long boots, hard boots;… Look out how you use proud words.
Thin Strips

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To a Contemporary Bunkshooter

You come along. . . tearing your s… Jesus. Where do you get that stuff? What do you know about Jesus? Jesus had a way of talking soft an…
Theme in Yellow

I SPOT the hills With yellow balls in autumn. I light the prairie cornfields Orange and tawny gold clusters And I am called pumpkins.
Wilderness

There is a wolf in me . . . fangs… tongue for raw meat. . . and the h… this wolf because the wilderness g… will not let it go. There is a fox in me. . . a silver…
Blue Ridge

BORN a million years ago you sta… watching the women come and live a… you and they thin-gray thin-dusk l… So it goes: either the early morni… I am glad I have seen racehorses,…
Blizzard Notes

I DON’T blame the kettle drums-t… And the snare drums-I know what t… And the harring booming bass drums… The howling spears of the Northwe… The lullabies of the Southwest ge…
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A MAN saw the whole world as a g… cross-bones. The rose flesh of lif… faces. Nothing counts. Everything… dust and ashes to ashes and then a… useless silence. So he saw it all.…
Autumn Movement

I cried over beautiful things know… The field of cornflower yellow is… the mother of the year, the taker… The northwest wind comes and the y… come in the first spit of snow on…
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GOOD-BY now to the streets and… locking hubs, The sun coming on the brass buckle… The muscles of the horses sliding… haunches,
In Tall Grass

BEES and a honeycomb in the drie… And I ask no better a winding she… (over the earth and under the sun.… Let the bees go honey-hunting with… Let there be wings and yellow dust…
Cool Tombs

WHEN Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs, he forgot the copperheads and the assassin … in the dust, in the cool tombs. And Ulysses Grant lost all thought of con men and Wall S...
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On Forty-first Street near Eighth Avenue a frame house wobbles. If houses went on crutches this house would be
Broken-Face Gargoyles

Though I can whisper to you I am looking for an undertaker humming a lullaby and throwing his feet in a swift and mystic buck-and-wing, now you see it and now you don’t. Fish to swim a ...



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