Carl Sandburg. Prairie. Harriet Monroe, ed. Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. 1912-22

Verse > Anthologies > Harriet Monroe, ed. > Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, 1912–22

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Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. 1912–22.

Prairie

By Carl Sandburg


I WAS born on the prairie, and the milk of its wheat, the red of its clover, the eyes of its women, gave me a song and a slogan.

Here the water went down, the icebergs slid with gravel, the gaps and the valleys hissed, and the black loam came, and the yellow sandy loam.
Here between the sheds of the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians, here now a morning-star fixes a fire sign over the timber claims and cow pastures, the corn belt, the cotton belt, the cattle ranches.
Here the grey geese go five hundred miles and back with a wind under their wings, honking the cry for a new home.
Here I know I will hanker after nothing so much as one more sunrise, or a sky moon of fire doubled to a river moon of water.	5
The prairie sings to me in the forenoon, and I know in the night I rest easy in the prairie arms, on the prairie heart. . . . . . . . . .
After the sunburn of the day—
handling a pitchfork at a hayrack—
after the eggs and biscuit and coffee,
the pearl-grey haystacks	10
in the gloaming
are cool prayers
to the harvest hands. . . . . . . . . .
In the city, among the walls, the overland passenger train is choked and the pistons hiss and the wheels curse.
On the prairie the overland flits on phantom wheels, and the sky and the soil between them muffle the pistons and cheer the wheels. . . . . . . . . .	15
I am here when the cities are gone.
I am here before the cities come.
I nourished the lonely men on horses.
I will keep the laughing men who ride iron.
I am dust of the dust of men.	20

The running water babbled to the deer, the cottontail, the gopher.
You came in wagons, making streets and schools,
Kin of the ax and rifle, kin of the plow and horse,
Singing Yankee Doodle, Old Dan Tucker, Turkey in the Straw.
You in the coonskin cap at a log-house door hearing a lone wolf howl,	25
You at a sod-house door reading the blizzards and chinooks let loose from Medicine Hat,
I am dust of your dust, as I am brother and mother
To the copper faces working in flint and clay,
The singing women and their sons of a thousand years ago,
Marching single file the timber and the plain.	30

I hold the dust of these amid changing stars.
I last while old wars are fought, while peace broods motherlike,
While new wars arise and the fresh killings of young men.

I fed the boys who went to France in great dark days.
Appomatox is a beautiful word to me, and so is Valley Forge and the Marne and Verdun,	35
I who have seen the red births and the red deaths
Of sons and daughters, I take peace or war, I say nothing and wait.

Have you seen a red sunset drip over one of my cornfields, the shore of night stars, the wave lines of dawn up a wheat valley?
Have you heard my threshing crews yelling in the chaff of a strawpile and the running wheat of the wagonboards, my cornhuskers, my harvest hands hauling crops, singing dreams of women, worlds, horizons?

Rivers cut a path on flat lands.	40
The mountains stand up.
The salt oceans press in
and push on the coast lines.
The sun, the wind, bring rain,
and I know what the rainbow writes across the east or west in a half-circle:	45
A love-letter pledge to come again. . . . . . . . . .
Towns on the Soo Line,
towns on the Big Muddy,
laugh at each other for cubs
and tease as children.	50

Omaha and Kansas City, Minneapolis and St. Paul—sisters in a house together, throwing slang, growing up.
Towns in the Ozarks, Dakota wheat towns, Wichita, Peoria, Buffalo—sisters throwing slang, growing up. . . . . . . . . .
Out of prairie-brown grass crossed with a streamer of wigwam smoke, out of a small pillar—a blue promise, out of wild ducks woven in greens and purples,
Here I saw a city rise and say to the peoples round the world: “Listen, I am strong, I know what I want.”

Out of log houses and stumps, canoes stripped from tree-sides, flatboats coaxed with an ax from the timber-claims—in the years when the red and the white men met—the houses and streets rose.	55

A thousand red men cried and went away to new places for corn and women; a million white men came and put up skyscrapers, threw out rails and wires—feelers to the salt sea: now the smokestacks bite the sky-line with stub teeth.

In an early year the call of a wild duck woven in greens and purples: now the riveter’s chatter, the police patrol, the song-whistle of the steam boat.

To a man across a thousand years I offer a handshake.
I say to him: “Brother, make the story short, for the stretch of a thousand years is short.” . . . . . . . . .
What brothers these in the dark?	60
What eaves of skyscrapers against a smoke moon,
These chimneys shaking on the lumber shanties
When the coal boats plow by on the river;
The hunched shoulders of the grain elevators;
The flame sprockets of the sheet-steel mills,	65
And the men in the rolling mills with their shirts off,
Playing their flesh arms against the twisting wrists of steel:
What brothers these
in the dark
of a thousand years? . . . . . . . . .	70
A headlight searches a snowstorm.
A funnel of white light shoots from over the pilot of the Pioneer Limited crossing Wisconsin.

In the morning hours, in the dawn,
The sun puts out the stars of the sky
And the headlight of the limited train.	75

The fireman waves his hand to a country school-teacher on a bob-sled:
A boy, yellow hair, red scarf and mittens, on the bob-sled; in his lunch-box a pork-chop sandwich and a V of gooseberry pie.

The horses fathom a snow to their knees.
Snow hats are on the rolling prairie hills.
The Mississippi bluffs wear snow hats. . . . . . . . . .	80
Keep your hogs on changing corn and mashes of grain, O farmerman.
Cram their insides till they waddle on short legs.
Under the drums of bellies, hams of fat,
Kill your hogs with a knife-slit under the ear;
Hack them with cleavers;	85
Hang them with hooks in the hind legs. . . . . . . . . .
A wagonload of radishes on a summer morning:
Sprinkles of dew on the crimson purple balls.
The farmer on the seat dangles the reins on the rumps of dapple-gray horses;
The farmer’s daughter with a basket of eggs dreams of a new hat to wear to the county fair.	90
On the left and right hand side of the road,
Marching corn.
I saw it knee-high weeks ago—now it is head-high.
Tassels of red silk creep at the ends of the ears. . . . . . . . . .
I am the prairie, mother of men, waiting.	95
They are mine, the threshing crews eating beefsteak, the farm-boys driving steers to the railroad cattle pens.
They are mine, the crowds of people at a Fourth-of-July basket picnic, listening to a lawyer read the Declaration of Independence, watching the pin-wheels and Roman candles at night, the young men and women, two by two, hunting the by-paths and kissing bridges.
They are mine, the horses looking over a fence in the frost of late October, saying good-morning to the horses hauling wagons of rutabaga to market.
They are mine, the old zigzag rail fences, the new barb wire. . . . . . . . . .
The cornhuskers wear leather on their hands.	100
There is no let-up to the wind. ..
Blue bandannas are knotted at the ruddy chins.

Fall-time and winter apples take on the smoulder of the five o’clock November sunset: falltime, leaves, bonfires, stubble—the old things go, and the earth is grizzled.
The land and the people hold memories, even among the ant-hills and the angleworms, among the toads and woodroaches, among grave-stone writings rubbed out by the rain. They keep old things that never grow old.

The frost loosens corn husks.	105
The sun, the rain, the wind,
loosen corn husks.
The men and women are helpers.
They are all cornhuskers together.
I see them late in the western evening	110
in a smoke-red dust. . . . . . . . . .
The phantom of a yellow rooster flaunting a scarlet comb, on top of a dung-pile crying hallelujah to the streaks of daylight;
The phantom of an old hunting dog nosing in the underbrush for muskrats, barking at a coon in a treetop at midnight, chewing a bone, chasing his tail round a corncrib;
The phantom of an old workhorse taking the steel point of a plow across a forty-acre field in spring, hitched to a harrow in summer, hitched to a wagon among cornshocks in fall:
These phantoms come into the talk and wonder of people on the front porch of a farm-house late summer nights.	115
“The shapes that are gone are here,” said an old man with a cob pipe in his teeth—one night in Kansas with a hot wind on the alfalfa.

Look at six eggs
In a mockingbird’s nest.

Listen to six mockingbirds
Flinging follies of Oh-be-joyful	120
Over the marshes and uplands.

Look at songs
Hidden in eggs. . . . . . . . . .
When the morning sun is on the trumpet-vine blossoms, sing at the kitchen pans: Shout All Over God’s Heaven.
When the rain slants on the potato hills, and the sun plays a silver shaft on the last shower, sing to the bush at the backyard fence: Mighty Lak a Rose.	125
When the icy sleet pounds on the storm windows and the house lifts to a great breath, sing for the outside hills: The Ole Sheep Done Know the Road, the Young Lambs Must Find the Way. . . . . . . . . .
Spring slips back with a girl face, calling always: “Any new songs for me? Any new songs?”

O prairie girl, be lonely, singing, dreaming, waiting. Your lover comes, your child comes, the years creep with toes of April rain on new-turned sod.
O prairie girl, whoever leaves you only crimson poppies to talk with, whoever puts a good-by kiss on your lips and never comes back—
There is a song deep as the fall-time redhaws, long as the layer of black loam we go to, the shine of the morningstar over the corn belt, the wave line of dawn up a wheat valley. . . . . . . . . .	130
O prairie mother, I am one of your boys.
I have loved the prairie as a man with a heart shot full of pain over love.
Here I know I will hanker after nothing so much as one more sunrise or a sky moon of fire doubled to a river moon of water.

I speak of new cities and new people.
I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.	135
I tell you yesterday is a wind gone down, a sun dropped in the west.
I tell you there is nothing in the world only an ocean of to-morrows, a sky of to-morrows.

I am a brother of the cornhuskers who say at sundown:
To-morrow is a day.

CONTENTS · BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

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