dots-menu
×

Home  »  Respectfully Quoted  »  Carl Sandburg (1878–1967)

Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations. 1989.

 
NUMBER: 1964
AUTHOR: Carl Sandburg (1878–1967)
QUOTATION: Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?

I am the grass.
Let me work.
ATTRIBUTION: CARL SANDBURG, “Grass,” The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg, rev. and expanded ed., p. 136 (1970). First published in 1918 in Cornhuskers.
SUBJECTS: War and peace