Have all been remembered with bronze memorials,

Shaping them on the job of getting all of us

Something to eat and something to wear,

When they stack a few silhouettes

Against the sky

Here in the park,

And show the real huskies that are doing the work of the world, and feeding people instead of butchering them,

Then maybe I will stand here

And look easy at this general of the army holding a flag in the air,

And riding like hell on horseback

Ready to kill anybody that gets in his way,

Ready to run the red blood and slush the bowels of men all over the sweet new grass of the prairie.

Killers

I am singing to you

Soft as a man with a dead child speaks;

Hard as a man in handcuffs,

Held where he cannot move:

Under the sun

Are sixteen million men,

Chosen for shining teeth,

Sharp eyes, hard legs,

And a running of young warm blood in their wrists.

And a red juice runs on the green grass;

And a red juice soaks the dark soil.

And the sixteen million are killing … and killing and killing.

I never forget them day or night:

They beat on my head for memory of them;

They pound on my heart and I cry back to them,

To their homes and women, dreams and games.

I wake in the night and smell the trenches,

And hear the low stir of sleepers in lines—

Sixteen million sleepers and pickets in the dark:

Some of them long sleepers for always,

Some of them tumbling to sleep tomorrow for always,

Fixed in the drag of the world’s heartbreak,

Eating and drinking, toiling . . . on a long job of killing.

Sixteen million men.

Planked Whitefish

(“I’m agoing to live anyhow until I die.”—Modern Ragtime Song)

Over an order of planked whitefish at a downtown club,

Horace Wild, the demon driver who hurled the first aeroplane that ever crossed the air over Chicago,

Told Charley Cutler, the famous rassler who never touches booze,

And Carl Sandburg, the distinguished poet now out of jail,

He saw near Ypres a Canadian soldier fastened on a barn door with bayonets pinning the hands and feet

And the arms and ankles arranged like Jesus at Golgotha 2,000 years before

Only in northern France he saw

The genital organ of the victim amputated and placed between the lips of the dead man’s mouth,

And Horace Wild, eating whitefish, looked us straight in the eyes,

And piled up circumstantial detail of what he saw one night running a truck pulling ambulances out of the mud near Ypres in November, 1915:

A box car next to a field hospital operating room … filled with sawed-off arms and legs . . .

Faces in the gray and the dark on the mud flats, white faces gibbering and loose convulsive arms making useless gestures,

And Horace Wild, the demon driver who loves fighting and can whip his weight in wildcats,