3

The water never stops running in the stream at the foot of the mountains.

Spring over, green life comes up and shows itself deep between the mountains.

On all sides, Force wakes up, young sheep bleat, birds chirp learning to fly.

This mulberry thick with leaves was planted by a hand now forgotten. Who knows the name of it?

4

The wind blusters; we push off in our boat; we are going to pick water chestnuts.

We lean on our sticks and watch the sun set behind the villages to the west.

Among the apricot trees we see a fisherman standing with bent shoulders; he looks old.

And by the famous Peach Blossom Fountain homes of men stand in a cluster.

Three Pieces on the Smoke of Autumn

Smoke of autumn is on it all.

The streamers loosen and travel.

The red west is stopped with a gray haze.

They fill the ash trees, they wrap the oaks,

They make a long-tailed rider

In the pocket of the first, the earliest evening star.

* * *

Three muskrats swim west on the Desplaines River.

There is a sheet of red ember glow on the river; it is dusk; and the muskrats one by one go on patrol routes west.

Around each slippery padding rat, a fan of ripples; in the silence of dusk a faint wash of ripples, the padding of the rats going west, in a dark and shivering river gold.

(A newspaper in my pocket says the Germans pierce the Italian line; I have letters from poets and sculptors in Greenwich Village; I have letters from an ambulance man in France and an I. W. W. man in Vladivostok.)

I lean on an ash and watch the lights fall, the red ember glow, and three muskrats swim west in a fan of ripples on a sheet of river gold.

* * *

Better the blue silence and the gray west,

The autumn mist on the rivet;

And not any hate and not any love,

And not anything at all of the keen and the deep:

Only the peace of a dog head on a barn floor,

And the new com shoveled in bushels

And the pumpkins brought from the com rows,

Umber lights of the dark,

Umber lanterns of the loam dark.

Here a dog head dreams.

Not any hate, not any love.

Not anything but dreams.

Brother of dusk and umber.

Poems of Protest

Beware of respectable people; beware of crooks, but of all crooks beware of the respectable; beware of snobs, and especially middle-class snobs; beware of people who are perfectly grammatical; beware of culture hounds; beware of the people who let their thinking be done for them and don’t know it.

— CARL SANDBURG, from the Chicago Daily News, May 30, 1930

Do tell me how you contrive to be a moral philosopher and a political agitator at one and the same time—and especially how you contrive to write such Poets’ English one minute and the plain vernacular the next. The combination is baffling!