OF my city the worst that men will ever say is this:
You took little children away from the sun and the dew,
And the glimmers that played in the grass under the great sky,
And the reckless rain; you put them between walls
To work, broken and smothered, for bread and wages,
To eat dust in their throats and die empty-hearted
For a little handful of pay on a few Saturday nights.

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.

THERE 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.

I am the People, the Mob
by Carl Sandburg

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.

My head knocks against the stars.
My feet are on the hilltops.
My finger-tips are in the valleys and shores of universal life.
Down in the sounding foam of primal things I reach my hands and play with pebbles of destiny.
I have been to hell and back many times.
I know all about heaven, for I have talked with God.
I dabble in the blood and guts of the terrible.
I know the passionate seizure of beauty
And the marvelous rebellion of man at all signs reading "Keep Off."

My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive in the universe.




Source: Poetry (March 1914).