CHICAGO POEMS
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Freedom's Plow
When a man starts out with nothing,
When a man starts out with his hands
Empty, but clean,
When a man starts to build a world,
.....
Langston Hughes
Song At Sunset
Splendor of ended day, floating and filling me!
Hour prophetic-hour resuming the past!
Inflating my throat-you, divine average!
You, Earth and Life, till the last ray gleams, I sing.
.....
Walt Whitman
Nebraska
April doesnt hurt here
Like it does in New England
The ground
Vast and brown
.....
Jack Kerouac
Whirls
NEITHER rose leaves gathered in a jar-respectably in Boston-these-nor drops of Christ blood for a chalice-decently in Philadelphia or Baltimore.
Cinders-these-hissing in a marl and lime of Chicago-also these-the howling of northwest winds across North and South Dakota-or the spatter of winter spray on sea rocks of Kamchatka.
.....
Carl Sandburg
Picnic Boat
Sunday night and the park policemen tell each other it
is dark as a stack of black cats on Lake Michigan.
A big picnic boat comes home to Chicago from the peach
farms of Saugatuck.
.....
Carl Sandburg
Mamie
Mamie beat her head against the bars of a little Indiana
town and dreamed of romance and big things off
somewhere the way the railroad trains all ran.
She could see the smoke of the engines get lost down
.....
Carl Sandburg
Poem (chicago)
'My age, my beast!' - Osip Mandelstam
On the lips a taste of tolling we are blind
The light drifts like dust over faces
.....
Bill Knott
John Horace Burleson
I won the prize essay at school
Here in the village,
And published a novel before I was twenty-five.
I went to the city for themes and to enrich my art;
.....
Edgar Lee Masters
Portrait
(For S. A.)TO write one book in five years
or five books in one year,
to be the painter and the thing painted,
... where are we, bo?
.....
Carl Sandburg
A Proper Trewe Idyll Of Camelot
Whenas ye plaisaunt Aperille shoures have washed and purged awaye
Ye poysons and ye rheums of earth to make a merrie May,
Ye shraddy boscage of ye woods ben full of birds that syng
Right merrilie a madrigal unto ye waking spring,
.....
Eugene Field
Siren
I became a criminal when I fell in love.
Before that I was a waitress.
I didn't want to go to Chicago with you.
.....
Louise Gluck
Mediums
THEY shall arise in the States,
They shall report Nature, laws, physiology, and happiness;
They shall illustrate Democracy and the kosmos;
They shall be alimentive, amative, perceptive;
.....
Walt Whitman
Lambert Hutchins
I have two monuments besides this granite obelisk:
One, the house I built on the hill,
With its spires, bay windows, and roof of slate;
The other, the lake-front in Chicago,
.....
Edgar Lee Masters
Carl Hamblin
The press of the Spoon River Clarion was wrecked,
And I was tarred and feathered,
For publishing this on the day the Anarchists were hanged in Chicago:
“I saw a beautiful woman with bandaged eyes
.....
Edgar Lee Masters
Of Him I Love Day And Night
OF him I love day and night, I dream'd I heard he was dead;
And I dream'd I went where they had buried him I love--but he was not
in that place;
And I dream'd I wander'd, searching among burial-places, to find him;
.....
Walt Whitman
Hoodlums
I AM a hoodlum, you are a hoodlum, we and all of us are a world of hoodlums-maybe so.
I hate and kill better men than I am, so do you, so do all of us-maybe-maybe so.
In the ends of my fingers the itch for another man's neck, I want to see him hanging, one of dusk's cartoons against the sunset.
This is the hate my father gave me, this was in my mother's milk, this is you and me and all of us in a world of hoodlums-maybe so.
.....
Carl Sandburg
Chicago
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
.....
Carl Sandburg
Fellow Citizens
I drank musty ale at the Illinois Athletic Club with
the millionaire manufacturer of Green River butter
one night
And his face had the shining light of an old-time Quaker,
.....
Carl Sandburg
Paterson
What do I want in these rooms papered with visions of money?
How much can I make by cutting my hair? If I put new heels on my shoes,
bathe my body reeking of masturbation and sweat, layer upon layer of excrement
dried in employment bureaus, magazine hallways, statistical cubicles, factory stairways,
.....
Allen Ginsberg
Epilogue
O Chansons foregoing
You were a seven days' wonder.
When you came out in the magazines
You created considerable stir in Chicago,
.....
Ezra Pound
Barney Hainsfeather
If the excursion train to Peoria
Had just been wrecked, I might have escaped with my life-
Certainly I should have escaped this place.
But as it was burned as well, they mistook me
.....
Edgar Lee Masters
Chicago Poet
I saluted a nobody.
I saw him in a looking-glass.
He smiled--so did I.
He crumpled the skin on his forehead, frowning--so did I.
.....
Carl Sandburg
Real Estate News
ARMOUR AVENUE was the name of this street and door signs on empty houses read 'The Silver Dollar,' 'Swede Annie' and the Christian names of madams such as 'Myrtle' and 'Jenny.'
Scrap iron, rags and bottles fill the front rooms hither and yon and signs in Yiddish say Abe Kaplan & Co. are running junk shops in **** houses of former times.
The segregated district, the Tenderloin, is here no more; the red-lights are gone; the ring of shovels handling scrap iron replaces the banging of pianos and the bawling songs of pimps.Chicago, 1915.
.....
Carl Sandburg
Youth
Strange bird,
His song remains secret.
He worked too hard to read books.
He never heard how Sherwood Anderson
.....
James Arlington Wright
John Hancock Otis
As to democracy, fellow citizens,
Are you not prepared to admit
That I, who inherited riches and was to the manner born,
Was second to none in Spoon River
.....
Edgar Lee Masters
Chicago Weather
To-day, fair Thisbe, winsome girl!
Strays o'er the meads where daisies blow,
Or, ling'ring where the brooklets purl,
Laves in the cool, refreshing flow.
.....
Eugene Field
Aner Clute
Over and over they used to ask me,
While buying the wine or the beer,
In Peoria first, and later in Chicago,
Denver, Frisco, New York, wherever I lived
.....
Edgar Lee Masters
A Power-plant
The Fisk Street turbine power station in Chicago
The invisible wheels go softly round and round-
Light is the tread of brazen-footed Power.
.....
Harriet Monroe
Off The Turnpike
Good ev'nin', Mis' Priest.
I jest stepped in to tell you Good-bye.
Yes, it's all over.
All my things is packed
.....
Amy Lowell
Ippolit Konovaloff
I was a gun-smith in Odessa.
One night the police broke in the room
Where a group of us were reading Spencer.
And seized our books and arrested us.
.....
Edgar Lee Masters
Nikki-rosa
Childhood rememberances are
always a drag if you're Black
you always remember things like
living in Woodlawn with no inside toilet
.....
Nikki Giovanni
In His Hand
De Young (in Chicago the story is told)
'Took his life in his hand,' like a warrior bold,
And stood before Buckley-who thought him behind,
For Buckley, the man-eating monster is blind.
.....
Ambrose Bierce