Living lighted skyscrapers and a night lingo of lanterns testify tomorrow shall have its own say-so.

9

Night gathers itself into a ball of dark yarn.

Night loosens the ball and it spreads.

The lookouts from the shores of Lake Michigan

find night follows day, and ping! ping! across

sheet gray the boat lights put their signals.

Night lets the dark yarn unravel, Night speaks and the yarns change

to fog and blue strands.

The lookouts turn to the city.

The canyons swarm with red sand lights

of the sunset.

The atoms drop and sift, blues cross over,

yellows plunge.

Mixed light shafts stack their bayonets,

pledge with crossed handles.

So, when the canyons swarm, it is then the

lookouts speak

Of the high spots over a street . . . mountain language

Of skyscrapers in dusk, the Railway Exchange,

The People’s Gas, the Monadnock, the Transportation,

Gone to the gloaming.

The river turns in a half circle.

The Goose Island bridges curve

over the river curve.

Then the river panorama

performs for the bridge,

dots . . . lights . . . dots . . . lights,

sixes and sevens of dots and lights,

a lingo of lanterns and searchlights,

circling sprays of gray and yellow.

10

A man came as a witness saying:

“I listened to the Great Lakes

And I listened to the Grand Prairie,

And they had little to say to each other,

A whisper or so in a thousand years.

‘Some of the cities are big,’ said one.

‘And some not so big,’ said another.

‘And sometimes the cities are all gone,’

Said a black knob bluff to a light green sea.”

Winds of the Windy City, come out of the prairie,

all the way from Medicine Hat.

Come out of the inland sea blue water, come where

they nickname a city for you.

Corn wind in the fall, come off the black lands,

come off the whisper of the silk hangers,

the lap of the flat spear leaves.

Blue water wind in summer, come off the blue miles

of lake, carry your inland sea blue fingers,

carry us cool, carry your blue to our homes.

White spring winds, come off the bag wool clouds,

come off the running melted snow, come white

as the arms of snow-born children.

Gray fighting winter winds, come along on the tear-

ing blizzard tails, the snouts of the hungry

hunting storms, come fighting gray in winter.

Winds of the Windy City,

Winds of com and sea blue,

Spring wind white and fighting winter gray,

Come home here—they nickname a city for you.

The wind of the lake shore waits and wanders.

The heave of the shore wind hunches the sand piles.

The winkers of the morning stars count out cities

And forget the numbers.

Images

[Sandburg] sought what Harriet Monroe described as the “hard clear style” of the Imagists with the elimination of “every unnecessary word, every unstructural ornament.”

— PENELOPE NIVEN, from Carl Sandburg: A Biography