Cornhuskers

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Cornhuskers
Carl Sandburg?1918
CORNHUSKERS?Prairie?River Roads?Prairie Waters By Night?Early Moon?Laughing Corn?Autumn Movement?Falltime?Illinois Farmer?Hits And Runs?Village In Late Summer?Blizzard Notes?Sunset From Omaha Hotel Window?Still Life?Band Concert?Three Pieces On The Smoke Of Autumn?Localities?Caboose Thoughts?Alix?Potato Blossom Songs And Jigs?Loam?Manitoba Childe Roland?Wilderness
PERSONS HALF KNOWN?Chicago Poet?Fire-Logs?Repetitions?Adelaide Crapsey?Young Bullfrogs?Memoir Of A Proud Boy?Bilbea?Southern Pacific?Washerwoman?Portrait Of A Motor Car?Girl In A Cage?Buffalo Bill?Sixteen Months?Child Margaret?Singing Nigger
LEATHER LEGGINGS?Leather Leggings?Prayers Of Steel?Always The Mob?Jabberers?Cartoon?Interior?Street Window?Palladiums?Clocks?Legends?Clowns Dying?Psalm Of Those Who Go Forth Before Daylight?Horses And Men In Rain?Questionnaire?Near Keokuk?Slants At Buffalo, New York?Flat Lands?Lawyer?Three Balls?Chicks?Humdrum?Joliet?Knucks?Testament
HAUNTS?Valley Song?In Tall Grass?Upstairs?Monosyllabic?Films?Kreisler?The Sea Hold?Goldwing Moth?Loin Cloth?Hemlock And Cedar?Summer Shirt Sale?Medallion?Bricklayer Love?Ashurnatsirpal Iii?Mammy Hums?Bringers?Crimson Rambler?Haunts?Have Me?Fire Dreams?Baby Face?The Year?Drumnotes 1?Moonset?Garden Wireless?Handfuls?Cool Tombs
SHENANDOAH?Shenandoah?New Feet?Old Osawatomie?Grass?Flanders?Gargoyle?Old Timers?House?John Ericsson Day Memorial, 1918?Remembered Women?Out Of White Lips?Memoir?A Million Young Workmen, 1915?Smoke?A Tall Man?The Four Brothers
_TO JANET AND MARGARET_
Acknowledgement is set forth that some thing were first printed in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse Chicago Daily News, and the service of the News, Enterprise Association.
--C. S.
CORNHUSKERS
PRAIRIE
I was born on the prairie and the milk of its wheat, the red of its clover, the eyes of its women, gave me a song and a slogan.
Here the water went down, the icebergs slid with gravel, the gaps and the valleys hissed, and the black loam came, and the yellow sandy loam.?Here between the sheds of the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians, here now a morning star fixes a fire sign over the timber claims and cow pastures, the corn belt, the cotton belt, the cattle ranches. Here the gray geese go five hundred miles and back with a wind under their wings honking the cry for a new home. Here I know I will hanker after nothing so much as one more sunrise or a sky moon of fire doubled to a river moon of water.
The prairie sings to me in the forenoon and I know in the night I rest easy in the prairie arms, on the prairie heart.
After the sunburn of the day
handling a pitchfork at a hayrack,
after the eggs and biscuit and coffee,
the pearl-gray haystacks
in the gloaming
are cool prayers
to the harvest hands.
In the city among the walls the overland passenger train is choked and the pistons hiss and the wheels curse. On the prairie the overland flits on phantom wheels and the sky and the soil between them muffle the pistons and cheer the wheels.
I am here when the cities are gone.?I am here before the cities come.?I nourished the lonely men on horses.?I will keep the laughing men who ride iron.?I am dust of men.
The running water babbled to the deer, the cottontail, the gopher. You came in wagons, making streets and schools,?Kin of the ax and rifle, kin of the plow and horse,?Singing Yankee Doodle, Old Dan Tucker, Turkey in the Straw, You in the coonskin cap at a log house door hearing a lone wolf howl, You at a sod house door reading the blizzards and chinooks let loose from Medicine Hat, I am dust of your dust, as I am brother and mother?To the copper faces, the worker in flint and clay,?The singing women and their sons a thousand years ago?Marching single file the timber and the plain.
I hold the dust of these amid changing stars.?I last while old wars are fought, while peace broods mother-like, While new wars arise and the fresh killings of young men.
I fed the boys who went to France in great dark days.?Appomattox is a beautiful word to me and so is Valley Forge and the Marne and Verdun, I who have seen the red births and the red deaths?Of sons and daughters, I take peace or war, I say nothing and wait.
Have you seen a red sunset drip over one of my cornfields, the shore of night stars, the wave lines of dawn up a wheat valley??Have you heard my threshing crews yelling in the chaff of a strawpile and the running wheat of the wagonboards, my cornhuskers, my harvest hands hauling crops, singing dreams of women, worlds, horizons?
Rivers cut a path on flat lands.
The mountains stand up.
The salt oceans press in