dots-menu
×

Home  »  Smoke and Steel  »  Index of First Lines

Carl Sandburg (1878–1967). Smoke and Steel. 1922.

Index of First Lines

After you have spent all the money
A liar goes in fine clothes
All I can give you is broken-face gargoyles
All the policemen, saloonkeepers and efficiency experts in Toledo knew Bern Dailey
Am I the river your white birds fly over?
Among the grassroots
And this will be all?
Armour Avenue was the name of this street
A swirl in the air where your head was once, here
Baby vamps, is it harder work than it used to be?
Because I have called to you
Bend low again, night of summer stars
Born a million years ago you stay here a million years
Both were jailbirds; no speechmakers at all
Box cars run by a mile long
By day … tireless smokestacks
Cast a bronze of my head and legs and put them on the king’s street
Child of the Aztec gods
Count these reminiscences like money
Death comes once, let it be easy
Death is stronger than all the governments
Did I see a crucifix in your eyes
Do you know how the dream looms?
Drum on your drums, batter on your banjoes
Early May, after cold rain the sun baffling cold wind
Elsie Flimmerwon, you got a job now with a jazz outfit in vaudeville
Every year Emily Dickinson sent one friend
Fasten black eyes on me
Feliksowa has gone again from our house and this time for good, I hope
First I would like to write for you a poem
Five geese deploy mysteriously
For the second time in a year this lady with the white hands is brought
From the time of the early radishes
Galoots, you hairy, hankering
Gather the stars if you wish it so
Give me your anathema
Grieg being dead we may speak of him and his art
Hats, where do you belong?
Have I broken the smaller tabernacles, O Lord?
Hokusai’s portrait of himself
Hot gold runs a winding stream on the inside of a green bowl
How much do you love me, a million bushels?
I am a hoodlum, you are a hoodlum
I am put high over all others in the city today
I asked the Mayor of Gary about the 12-hour day and the 7-day week
I don’t know how he came
If I should pass the tomb of Jonah
If the oriole calls like last year
If we were such and so, the same as these
If you never came with a pigeon rainbow purple
I have ransacked the encyclopedias
I have lived in many half-worlds myself … and so I know you
I have been in Pennsylvania
I have seen this city in the day and the sun
I knew a real man once, says Agatha in the splendor of a shagbark hickory tree
I love him, I love him, ran the patter of her lips
In a Yiddish eating place on Rivington Street
In a jeweler’s shop I saw a man beating
In the moonlight under a shag-bark hickory tree
In the morning, a Sunday morning
In the night, when the sea-winds take the city in their arms
I painted on the roof of a skyscraper
I saw a famous man eating soup
I saw a telegram handed a two hundred pound man at a desk
I saw Man, the man-hunter
I shall cry God to give me a broken foot
I tell them where the wind comes from
It is something to face the sun and know you are free
I thought of offering you apothegms
I took away three pictures
It’s a jazz affair, drum crashes and cornet razzes
I walked among the streets of an old city
I wander down on Clinton street south of Polk
I was a boy when I heard three red words
I will keep you and bring hands to hold you against a great hunger
I will read ashes for you, if you ask me
Joy … weaving two violet petals for a coat lapel
Keep a red heart of memories
Let down your braids of hair, lady
Let it go on; let the love of this hour be poured out
Let us go out of the fog, John
Listen a while, the moon is a lovely woman, a lonely woman
Long ago I learned how to sleep
Many things I might have said today
Many ways to spell good night
Mary has a thingamajig clamped on her ears
Money is nothing now, even if I had it
My people are gray
My shirt is a token and symbol
Neither rose leaves gathered in a jar
New neighbors came to the corner house at Congress and Green streets
Nothing else in this song—only your face
One by one lights of a skyscraper fling their checkering cross work on the velvet gown of night
One man killed another
On Forty First Street
Out of the testimony of such reluctant lips
Pea pods cling to stems
Pencils
Pietro has twenty red and blue balloons on a string
Play it across the table
Poland, France, Judea ran in her veins
Policeman in front of a bank 3 A.M. … lonely
Red barns and red heifers spot the green
Red gold of pools
Rings of iron gray smoke
Roses and gold
Seven days all fog, all mist, and the turbines pounding through high seas
Shake back your hair, O red-headed girl
Six street ends come together here
Sleep is a maker of makers
Smoke of the fields in spring is one
Snow took us away from the smoke valleys into white mountains
Snub nose, the guts of twenty mules are in your cylinders and transmission
Somebody loses whenever somebody wins
Somebody’s little girl
Somewhere you and I remember we came
Speak, sir, and be wise
Strong rocks hold up the riksdag bridge
The balloons hang on wires in the Marigold Gardens
The boy Alexander understands his father to be a famous lawyer
The bridge says: Come across, try me; see how good I am
The buffaloes are gone
The dancing girls here … after a long night of it
The down drop of the blackbird
The dome of the capitol looks to the Potomac river
The double moon, one on the high back drop of the west
Then came, Oscar, the time of the guns
The fine cloth of your love might be a fabric of Egypt
The five o’clock prairie sunset is a strong man going to sleep after a long day in a cornfield
The flutter of blue pigeon’s wings
The grave of Alexander Hamilton is in Trinity yard at the end of Wall Street
The grip of the ice is gone now
The haggard woman with a hacking cough and a deathless love whispers of white flowers
The high horses of the sea broke their white riders
The horse’s name was Remorse
The knees
The lady in red, she in the chile con carne red
The law says you and I belong to each other, George
The lawyers, Bob, know too much
Ten miles of flat land along the sea
The milk drops on your chin, Helga
The peace of great doors be for you
There is something terrible
There is a woman on Michigan Boulevard keeps a parrot and goldfish and two white mice
There is a blue star, Janet
There’s a hole in the bottom of the sea
There was a woman tore off a red velvet gown
There was a late autumn cricket
There was a wild pigeon came often to Hinkley’s timber
There will be a rusty gun on the wall, sweetheart
The roses slanted crimson sobs
The river is gold under a sunset of Illinois
The sea at its worst drives a white foam up
These are the tawny days: your face comes back
The sea rocks have a green moss
The sea-wash never ends
The sins of Kalamazoo are neither scarlet nor crimson
The six month child
The shale and water thrown together so-so first of all
The sheets of night mist travel a long valley
The snow piles in dark places are gone
The sunset swept
The telescope picks off star dust
The time has gone by
The west window is a panel of marching onions
The wind stops, the wind begins
The wishes on this child’s mouth
The woman named To-morrow
They all want to play Hamlet
They ask me to handle bronzes
They have painted and sung
They put up big wooden gods
They were calling certain styles of whiskers by the name of “lilacs
This handful of grass, brown, says little
This Mohammedan colonel from the Caucasus yells with his voice and wigwags with his arms
Three tailors of Tooley Street wrote: We, the People
Three violins are trying their hearts
Throw roses on the sea where the dead went down
To have your face left overnight
To write one book in five years
Two fishes swimming in the sea
Wandering oversea dreamer
What can we say of the night?
What cry of peach blossoms
What does the hangman think about
What was the name you called me?
When the sea is everywhere
Who knows what I know
Why should I be wondering
Wishes left on your lips
Write your wishes
Yes, the Dead speak to us
You slut, he flung at her