Over land and women, laughter and language.

Put in mystery without end. Then add mystery.

Anti-War and War Poems

Millions of men go to war, acres of them are buried, guns and ships broken, cities burned, villages sent up in smoke, and children where cows are killed off amid hoarse barbecues vanish like finger-rings of smoke in a north wind.

— CARL SANDBURG, from “Smoke,” in Complete Poems

House

Two Swede families live downstairs and an Irish policeman upstairs, and an old soldier, Uncle Joe.

Two Swede boys go upstairs and see Joe. His wife is dead, his only son is dead, and his two daughters in Missouri and Texas don’t want him around.

The boys and Uncle Joe crack walnuts with a hammer on the bottom of a flatiron while the January wind howls and the zero air weaves laces on the window glass.

Joe tells the Swede boys all about Chickamauga and Chattanooga, how the Union soldiers crept in rain somewhere a dark night and ran forward and killed many Rebels, took flags, held a hill, and won a victory told about in the histories in school.

Joe takes a piece of carpenter’s chalk, draws lines on the floor and piles stove wood to show where six regiments were slaughtered climbing a slope.

“Here they went” and “Here they went,” says Joe, and the January wind howls and the zero air weaves laces on the window glass.

The two Swede boys go downstairs with a big blur of guns, men, and hills in their heads. They eat herring and potatoes and tell the family war is a wonder and soldiers are a wonder.

One breaks out with a cry at supper: I wish we had a war now and I could be a soldier.

Old Timers

I am an ancient reluctant conscript.

On the soup wagons of Xerxes I was a cleaner of pans.

On the march of Miltiades’ phalanx I had a haft and head;

I had a bristling gleaming spear-handle.

Red-headed Caesar picked me for a teamster.

He said, “Go to work, you Tuscan bastard,

Rome calls for a man who can drive horses.”

The units of conquest led by Charles the Twelfth,

The whirling whimsical Napoleonic columns:

They saw me one of the horseshoers.

I trimmed the feet of a white horse Bonaparte swept the night stars with.

Lincoln said, “Get into the game; your nation takes you.”

And I drove a wagon and team and I had my arm shot off

At Spotsylvania Court House.

I am an ancient reluctant conscript.

Ready to Kill

Ten minutes now I have been looking at this.

I have gone by here before and wondered about it.

This is a bronze memorial of a famous general

Riding horseback with a flag and a sword and a revolver on him.

I want to smash the whole thing into a pile of junk to be hauled away to the scrap yard.

I put it straight to you,

After the farmer, the miner, the shop man, the factory hand, the fireman and the teamster,