Carl Sandburg

“ Do you see, Bill, how your interests and mine and everybody else's are all tangled up and woven in with each other? Do you see how society, all of us together, produced Rockefeller, Thaw, and the one-legged man on the corner selling lead pencils? What would the world be without people? Solitary confinement is the cruelest punishment you can give a man—the chances are he will go crazy and try to kill himself when enough hours have passed during which he has heard no human voice and known no human touch. What does a singer or a poet or an actor amount to without listeners? ”

“ We shall have to work out with the Negro a relationship which gives him complete access to all the machinery of our common civilization, and yet allows him to live so that no Negro need dream of a white heaven and of bleached angels. Pride of race will come to the Negro when a dark skin is no longer associated with poverty, ignorance, misery, terror and insult. When this pride arises every white man in America will be the happier for it. ”

“ I'm glad you're a dead man, William Morris, I'm glad you're down in the damp and mouldy, only a memory instead of a living man—I'm glad you're gone.
You never lied to us, William Morris, you loved the shape of those stones piled and carved for you to dream over and wonder because workmen got joy of life into them,
Workmen in aprons singing while they hammered, and praying, and putting their songs and prayers into the walls and roofs, the bastions and cornerstones and gargoyles—all their children and kisses of women and wheat and roses growing. ”

“ So again the gophers, the black and brown striped ground squirrels, sit with their backs straight up, sitting on their soft paddy tails, sitting in the spring song murmur of the south wind, saying, "This is the prairie and the prairie belongs to us."
Far away to-day where the sky drops down and the sunsets open doors for the nights to come through—where the running winds meet, change faces and come back—there the gophers are playing the-green-grass-grew-all-around, playing cross tag, skip tag, hop tag, billy-be-tag, billy-be-it. ”

“ Once many days ago I drank a glassful of something and the picture of you shivered and slid on top of the stuff.
And again it was nobody else but you I heard in the singing voice of a careless humming woman.
One night when I sat with chums telling stories at a bonfire flickering red embers, in a language its own talking to a spread of white stars:
It was you that slunk laughing in the clumsy staggering shadows. ”

“ Hour by hour the sun and the rain, the air and the rust, and the press of time running into centuries, play on the building inside and out and use it.
Men who sunk the pilings and mixed the mortar are laid in graves where the wind whistles a wild song without words
And so are men who strung the wires and fixed the pipes and tubes and those who saw it rise floor by floor. ”

“ The right shoulder of a strong man I leaned on.
The face of the rain that drizzled on the short neck of a canal boat.
The eyes of a child who slept while death went over and under.
The petals of peony pink that fluttered in a shot of wind come and gone.
This is the song I rested with: Head, heels, and fingers rocked to the nigger mammy humming of it, to the mile-off steamboat landing whistle of it.
The murmurs run with bees' wings in a late summer sun. They go and come with white surf
slamming on a beach all day. ”

“ If a blind man plays an accordion on the street to make people cry it makes them sad and when they are sad the gold goes away off the accordion. And if a blind man goes to sleep because his music is full of sleepy songs like the long wind in a sleepy valley, then while the blind man is sleeping the diamonds in the diamond rabbit all go away. ”

“ Better homes, better food, better clothing, more pictures, books, music, culture, are possible for the masses of the people. Calmly and thoughtfully we say labor is entitled to more of the good things of life. Never before in the history of the world was there such stupendous and overwhelming plenty of all the good things that mean material welfare. If you come asking for these things like beggars, you will be treated like beggars. Beg no longer, but study your cause, get into political action and learn to demand. That is the message of Socialism to the working class. ”

“ Each morning as I move through this river of young-woman life I feel a wonder about where it is all going, so many with a peach bloom of young years on them and laughter of red lips and memories in their eyes of dances the night before and plays and walks. ”

“ Women trapsing along in flimsy clothes catching play of sun-fire to their skin and eyes.
Inside the playhouse are movies from under the sea. From the heat of pavements and the dust of side-walks, passers-by go in a breath to be witnesses of large cool sponges, large cool fishes, large cool valleys and ridges of coral spread silent in the soak of the ocean floor thousands of years. ”

“ Each child has a moon face and a moon name. And sometimes their father and mother pile them all into a car and they ride out to the valley where the peacocks always cry before it rains—and where the frogs always gamble with golden dice after midnight.
And what they look longest at is a summer moon hanging in the tree-tops, when there is a lisp of leaves, and the shine of the moon and the lisp of the leaves seem to be telling each other something. ”

“ Ten-dollar-a-week stenographers take letters from corporation officers, lawyers, efficiency engineers, and tons of letters go bundled from the building to all ends of the earth.
Smiles and tears of each office girl go into the soul of the building just the same as the master-men who rule the building.
Hands of clocks turn to noon hours and each floor empties its men and women who go away and eat and come back to work.
Toward the end of the afternoon all work slackens and all jobs go slower as the people feel day closing on them. ”

“ As many as skies in delicate change
Of cloud and blue and flimmering sun.
Yet,
You may not come, O girl of a dream,
We may but pass as the world goes by
And take from a look of eyes into eyes,
A film of hope and a memoried day. ”

“ And show the real huskies that are doing the work of the world, and feeding people instead of butchering them,
Then maybe I will stand here
And look easy at this general of the army holding a flag in the air,
And riding like hell on horseback
Ready to kill anybody that gets in his way,
Ready to run the red blood and slush the bowels of men all over the sweet new grass of the prairie. ”

“ I AM THE PEOPLE, THE MOB
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. ”

“ Good-night is the word, good-night to the kings, to the czars, Good-night to the kaiser. The breakdown and the fade-away begins.
The shadow of a great broom, ready to sweep out the trash, is here.
One finger is raised that counts the czar, The ghost who beckoned men who come no more—
The czar gone to the winds on God's great dustpan,
The czar a pinch of nothing,
The last of the gibbering Romanoffs. ”

“ They moved straight toward each other. In the middle of Main Street they met. The Wooden Indian jumped straddle of the Shaghorn Buffalo. And the Shaghorn Buffalo put his head down and ran like a prairie wind straight west on Main Street.
At the high hill over the big bend of the Clear Green River they stopped. They stood looking. Drifting and shifting like a woman's blue veil, the blue mist filled the valley and the milk white moon filled the valley. And the mist and the moon touched with a lingering, wistful kiss the clear green water of the Clear Green River. ”

“ All these things trace back finally to the industrial and political worlds for causes. If nobody gets too much everybody will get enough. Modern society is mob at the top and mob at the bottom. The rich have their gilded hells and folly; the poor have their slums and vice. Between the two, as the only saving force in modern civilization, stands the working class organization, the producers, who by mental and manual labor hold a balance of sanity and give a promise of a better day for humanity. ”

“ Prairie and valley, streets of the city, pour people into it and they mingle among its twenty floors and are poured out again back to the streets, prairies and valleys.
It is the men and women, boys and girls so poured in and out all day that give the building a soul of dreams and thoughts and memories. ”

“ HORSES AND MEN IN RAIN
Let us sit by a hissing steam radiator a winter's day, gray wind pattering frozen raindrops on the window, And let us talk about milk wagon drivers and grocery delivery boys.
Let us keep our feet in wool slippers and mix hot punches—and talk about mail carriers and messenger boys slipping along the icy sidewalks. Let us write of olden, golden days and hunters of the Holy Grail and men called "knights" riding horses in the rain, in the cold frozen rain for ladies they loved. ”