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Home  »  Chicago Poems  »  32. Cumulatives

Carl Sandburg (1878–1967). Chicago Poems. 1916.

32. Cumulatives

STORMS have beaten on this point of land

And ships gone to wreck here

and the passers-by remember it

with talk on the deck at night

as they near it.

Fists have beaten on the face of this old prize-fighter

And his battles have held the sporting pages

and on the street they indicate him with their

right fore-finger as one who once wore

a championship belt.

A hundred stories have been published and a thousand rumored

About why this tall dark man has divorced two beautiful young women

And married a third who resembles the first two

and they shake their heads and say, “There he goes,”

when he passes by in sunny weather or in rain

along the city streets.