Carl Sandburg – Fourteen Lines

Hope Is A Tattered Flag

Hope Is A Tattered Flag

by Carl Sandburg (1878 – 1967)

Hope is a tattered flag and a dream of time.
Hope is a heartspun word, the rainbow, the shadblow in white
The evening star inviolable over the coal mines,
The shimmer of northern lights across a bitter winter night,
The blue hills beyond the smoke of the steel works,
The birds who go on singing to their mates in peace, war, peace,
The ten-cent crocus bulb blooming in a used-car salesroom,
The horseshoe over the door, the luckpiece in the pocket,
The kiss and the comforting laugh and resolve—
Hope is an echo, hope ties itself yonder, yonder.
The spring grass showing itself where least expected,
The rolling fluff of white clouds on a changeable sky,
The broadcast of strings from Japan, bells from Moscow,
Of the voice of the prime minister of Sweden carried
Across the sea in behalf of a world family of nations
And children singing chorals of the Christ child
And Bach being broadcast from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
And tall skyscrapers practically empty of tenants
And the hands of strong men groping for handholds
And the Salvation Army singing God loves us…

Whew, its December. I survived another November’s intensity and am grateful for the preparations of the holidays. Hard to believe that Christmas is only 3 weeks away with today’s temperature over 50 degrees (October weather in Minnesota). But the cold will come soon enough and the balmy weather allows me one last weekend to attend to matters calling me before the land is covered in snow, like dragging a magnet across my driveway to pick up all the nails and screws lurking where tractor tires might find them when pushing snow.

As it often happens, taking a deeper dive into matters in which I know little, opens my eyes to connections I wasn’t aware. Spending the month with Civil War poets wasn’t my favorite topic, but I learned far more than I expected when I started. I am going to start the month of December with a counterpoint of hope and peace. Coleridge’s poem a reminder that as human’s we live in the full spectrum of experience, and we have to figure out how to take our good with our worst. Sandburg’s poem continues to amaze me with his wisdom. (A shadblow is flowering bush.) I enjoy his playfulness in word creation; luckpiece and heartspun.

These two poems separated by more than a 100 years in their creation, share ideas on the handholds that exist for us to hold on to in all the range of human experience. (And if you are looking for the sonnet’s influence on either of these poems, take note of the syllable count of each line and the rhyming schemes in Coleridge’s poem the second time you read it through….) What is a personal symbol of hope for you during this holiday season?

Human Life

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 – 1834)

If dead, we cease to be ; if total gloom
Swallow up life’s brief flash for aye, we fare
As summer-gusts, of sudden birth and doom,
Whose sound and motion not alone declare,
But are their whole of being ! If the breath
Be Life itself, and not its task and tent,
If even a soul like Milton’s can know death ;
O Man ! thou vessel purposeless, unmeant,
Yet drone-hive strange of phantom purposes !
Surplus of Nature’s dread activity,
Which, as she gazed on some nigh-finished vase,
Retreating slow, with meditative pause,
She formed with restless hands unconsciously.
Blank accident ! nothing’s anomaly !
If rootless thus, thus substanceless thy state,
Go, weigh thy dreams, and be thy hopes, thy fears,
The counter-weights !–Thy laughter and thy tears
Mean but themselves, each fittest to create
And to repay the other ! Why rejoices
Thy heart with hollow joy for hollow good ?
Why cowl thy face beneath the mourner’s hood ?
Why waste thy sighs, and thy lamenting voices,
Image of Image, Ghost of Ghostly Elf,
That such a thing as thou feel’st warm or cold ?
Yet what and whence thy gain, if thou withhold
These costless shadows of thy shadowy self ?
Be sad ! be glad ! be neither ! seek, or shun !
Thou hast no reason why ! Thou canst have none ;
Thy being’s being is contradiction.

The Children Know

The farther we’ve gotten from the magic and mystery of our past, the more we’ve come to need Halloween
Paula Curan: October Dreams, A Celebration of Halloween

Theme in Yellow

by Carl Sandburg (1878 – 1967)

I spot the hills
With yellow balls in autumn.
I light the prairie cornfields
Orange and tawny gold clusters
And I am called pumpkins.
On the last of October
When dusk is fallen
Children join hands
And circle round me
Singing ghost songs
And love to the harvest moon;
I am a jack-o’-lantern
With terrible teeth
And the children know
I am fooling.

Mr. Macklin’s Jack O’Lantern

by David McCord (1897 – 1997)

Mr. Macklin takes his knife
And carves the yellow pumpkin face:
Three holes bring eyes and nose to life,
The mouth has thirteen teeth in place.
Then Mr. Macklin just for fun
Transfers the corn-cob pipe from his
Wry mouth to Jack’s, and everyone
Dies laughing! O what fun it is
Till Mr. Macklin draws the shade
And lights the candle in Jack’s skull.
Then all the inside dark is made
As spooky and as horrorful
As Halloween, and creepy crawl
The shadows on the tool-house floor,
With Jack’s face dancing on the wall.
O Mr. Macklin! where’s the door?

A Man Told Me Once

Bad People

by Robert Bly (1926 –

A man told me once that all the bad people
Were needed. Maybe not all, but your fingernails
You need; they are really claws, and we know
Claws. The sharks—what about them?
They make other fish swim faster. The hard-faced men
In black coats who chase you for hours
In dreams—that’s the only way to get you
To the shore. Sometimes those hard women
Who abandon you get you to say, “You.”
A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed.
It doesn’t move on its own. Sometimes it takes
A lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving.
Then they blow across three or four States.
This man told me that things work together.
Bad handwriting sometimes leads to new ideas;
And a careless god—who refuses to let people
Eat from the Tree of Knowledge—can lead
To books, and eventually to us. We write
Poems with lies in them, but they help a little.

Given the divide that has developed politically and culturally in this country, I have started to think differently. I have considered that maybe I need to focus less on believing that the chasm can be closed and more on recognizing the counterbalance opposing views provide, the positive that comes from different viewpoints in hopefully preventing either side from tipping over backwards. People are not magnets, opposites do not attract. We tend to be attracted to those with similar experiences and ideas, yet if there is not mutual respect and acceptance for our inherent human diversity we can not succeed as a multi-cultural society.

I wonder, do each of us have a ready list of bad people in our minds? Can we equally construct a list of good people just as easily? What about all the people in the middle, the majority we lump into neither bad or good? And if I was on one of your lists, what would it take for me to go from one list to the other or fall out of sight into the pleasantly benign as neither?

I pose those questions because it feels like our political machines and attack ads are constantly putting candidates into one list or the other, depending on who is paying for the ad. The sheer volume of the ads is overwhelming. Is it time to stop seeing the other side of the political spectrum as bad and ours as good and start seeing them as our neighbors who prevent us from getting too carried away with ourselves and tipping over? Gerrymandering voting districts to artificially create majorities on either side do not provide the agile change that we need in these turbulent times. Democracy wasn’t supposed to go to the cleverest most manipulative side, the side that prevails in courts based on obtuse interpretations of legal points, it was supposed to be an opportunity for majority rule and for that majority to change quickly as needed to respond to issues most relevant to the electorate at the moment.

I fear we have gotten hoodwinked by expert marketing. scientific polling meant to influence outcomes, political strategists, political scientists and pundits with their own hidden agendas focused more on money and less on what is the best possible outcome for our communities and for our future. And in the end, as I turn off the TV unable to withstand another political ad, I welcome the opportunity to spend a little time in Carl Sandburg’s world of poetry, where beautiful unanswerable questions await.

Under the Harvest Moon

by Carl Sandburg

Under the harvest moon,
When the soft silver
Drips shimmering
Over the garden nights,
Death, the gray mocker,
Comes and whispers to you
As a beautiful friend
Who remembers.

Under the summer roses
When the flagrant crimson
Lurks in the dusk
Of the wild red leaves,
Love, with little hands,
Comes and touches you
With a thousand memories,
And asks you
Beautiful, unanswerable questions.

Believe Nothing Of It All

“The profession of book writing makes horse racing look like a stable, solid business.”

John Steinbeck

Sonnet Xli – Having This Day My Horse

By Sir Philip Sidney

Having this day my horse, my hand, my lance
Guided so well that I obtain’d the prize,
Both by the judgment of the English eyes
And of some sent from that sweet enemy France;
Horsemen my skill in horsemanship advance,
Town folks my strength; a daintier judge applies
His praise to sleight which from good use doth rise;
Some lucky wits impute it but to chance;
Others, because of both sides I do take
My blood from them who did excel in this,
Think Nature me a man of arms did make.
How far they shot awry! The true cause is,
Stella look’d on, and from her heav’nly face
Sent forth the beams which made so fair my race.

I have recently been schooled in the ways of horse betting by a friend for whom the horses are a passionate hobby. His approach is to use a combination of 25 years of watching horse racing at tracks all over the world, watching trainers, jockey’s and owners success and failure and combining it with a complete sense of folly in betting. It seems to work. His advice, always bet the black horse if wearing a one to win or bet the horse wearing the number of the race on that days card before the 5th, for instance the 4 horse in the 4th, particularly if he likes the jockey.

The only time horse racing even comes into my consciousness is the month during the triple crown, when I follow peripherally the story lines that emerge around long shots, favorites, beautiful thoroughbreds coming up lame, jockeys career’s made or lost in a seconds on a muddy track and the beauty of what a race horse can do in the hands of amazing athletes. It is a beauty to behold.

If you had a team helping you everyday, exercising with you, carefully watching your nutrition, bathing you, encouraging you, asking you to do your best, what race could you run with elegance? What triple crown are you racing in your life and who is your team supporting you, helping you to win, share the journey or consoling you in defeat? Remember, regardless of where you place, stay in the race and feel the pleasure of blood beating in your veins.

Horse Fiddle

by Carl Sandburg

FIRST I would like to write for you a poem to be shouted in the teeth of a strong wind.
Next I would like to write one for you to sit on a hill and read down the river valley on a late summer afternoon, reading it in less than a whisper to Jack on his soft wire legs learning to stand up and preach, Jack-in-the-pulpit.
As many poems as I have written to the moon and the streaming of the moon spinners of light, so many of the summer moon and the winter moon I would like to shoot along to your ears for nothing, for a laugh, a song,
for nothing at all,
for one look from you,
for your face turned away
and your voice in one clutch
half way between a tree wind moan
and a night-bird sob.
Believe nothing of it all, pay me nothing, open your window for the other singers and keep it shut for me.
The road I am on is a long road and I can go hungry again like I have gone hungry before.
What else have I done nearly all my life than go hungry and go on singing?
Leave me with the hoot owl.
I have slept in a blanket listening.
He learned it, he must have learned it
From two moons, the summer moon,
And the winter moon
And the streaming of the moon spinners of light.

I Dream A World

AP530326012 — Langston Hughes Testifying Before The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1953.

Blacklisted

by Carl Sandburg

Why shall I keep the old name?
What is a name anywhere anyway?
A name is a cheap thing all fathers and mothers leave each child:
A job is a job and I want to live, so
Why does God Almighty or anybody else care whether I take a new name to go by?

I Dream A World

by Langston Hughes

I dream a world where man
No other man will scorn,
Where love will bless the earth
And peace its paths adorn
I dream a world where all
Will know sweet freedom’s way,
Where greed no longer saps the soul
Nor avarice blights our day.
A world I dream where black or white,
Whatever race you be,
Will share the bounties of the earth
And every man is free,
Where wretchedness will hang its head
And joy, like a pearl,
Attends the needs of all mankind-
Of such I dream, my world!

In my recent blog post, Break My Ghostly Heart, I wrote about Dorothy Parker being blacklisted and the impact it had on her. However no individual was accused by the House Un-american Activities Committee (HUAC) of having more communist associations than Langston Hughes. Hughes would be forced to testify before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s subcommittee in 1953. In the end, Hughes’ legacy is one as a true American, not McCarthy. The current claims of being “more patriotic” by Trump and his supporters ring with the same falsehoods that McCarthyism did in the 1950’s.

Langston responded to a questionnaire sent by Elmer Rice to 50 writers who had been named as suspected communists by the government in Red Channels. Rice asked Langston a series of questions, but simply put – he was asking how has being blacklisted impacted you. Here is a portion of Hughes’ brilliant reply to Rice in a letter in 1952.

Elmer Rice: QUESTIONNAIRE

Has the publication of your name in Red Channels adversely affected your employment or the use of your material in the radio and television fields?

Dear Elmer,

Here are my answers to the questionnaire re the FCC and blacklisting in TV and radio:

The publication of my name in RED CHANNELS has not affected my employment in TV or radio. Being colored I received no offers of employment in these before RED CHANNELS appeared, and have had none since—so it hasn’t affected me at all.
Answered above.
Negro writers, being black, have always been blacklisted in radio and TV. Only once in a blue moon are any colored writers given an opportunity to do a script and then, usually, with no regularity, and no credits. Like Hollywood, Negroes just simply are not employed in the writing fields in the American entertainment industry.
My personal experience has been that in my 25 years of writing, I have not been asked to do more than four or five commercial one-shot scripts. These were performed on major national hook-ups, but produced for me no immediate additional jobs or requests. One script for BBC was done around the world with an all-star cast. No American stations offered me work. My agents stated flatly, “It is just about impossible to sell a Negro writer to Hollywood or radio, and they use Negro subject matter very rarely.” Even the “Negro” shows like “Amos and Andy” and “Beulah” are written largely by white writers—the better to preserve the stereotypes, I imagine.

During the war I did a number of requested scripts for the Writers War Board, used throughout the country. Most of the white writers serving this committee also got any number of paying jobs to do patriotic scripts. Not one chance to do a commercial script was offered me.

My one period of work in radio covering several weeks was a few summers ago scripting the NBC show, “Swing Time at The Savoy”, a Negro variety revue. This was achieved at the insistence of the N.A.A.C.P. that objected to the stereotypes in the audition scripts written by white writers. NBC had at that time had not one Negro writer on its staff—which would have saved them making the mistakes the N.A.A.C.P. objected to and which were offensive to the general Negro public. As far as I know, Negro writers are, however, “blacklisted” at NBC. I know of none working there regularly.

Richard Durham in Chicago and Bob Lucas and Woody Bovell in New York are excellent radio writers but, being Negroes, they work with great irregularity—not due to being red but due to being colored.

No point in my appearing—the color bars everyone knows have been with us since radio began, before TV was born, and long ere that.

I’d like to add, however, my personal gratitude to you and the committee for your very fine stand in relation to the freedom to work—for those writers who are white enough to work (when not red-baited) and I hope as well for those writers who have been blacklisted from birth.

And to you for your personal stand, Elmer, my very great admiration.

Sincerely yours,
Langston Hughes

What Can Be Explained Is Not Poetry

Languages

by Carl Sandburg (1878 – 1967)

There are no handles upon a language
Whereby men take hold of it
And mark it with signs for its remembrance.
It is a river, this language,
Once in a thousand years
Breaking a new course
Changing its way to the ocean.
It is mountain effluvia
Moving to valleys
And from nation to nation
Crossing borders and mixing.
Languages die like rivers.
Words wrapped round your tongue today
And broken to shape of thought
Between your teeth and lips speaking
Now and today
Shall be faded hieroglyphics
Ten thousand years from now.
Sing—and singing—remember
Your song dies and changes
And is not here to-morrow

Buffalo Dusk

by Carl Sandburg

The buffaloes are gone.

And those who saw the buffaloes are gone.

Those who saw the buffaloes by thousands and how they pawed the prairie sod into dust with their hoofs, their great heads down pawing on in a great pageant of dusk,

Those who saw the buffaloes are gone.

And the buffaloes are gone.

Death Sonnets II

By Gabriela Mistral

Translated by D. K. Fennell

This growing tiredness will culminate some day,
and the soul will tell the body of its craving to desist
from dragging its heavy weight though that rosy way,
where men continue going, simply to exist.

You will feel at your side men digging urgently,
and another slumberer arrive at your noiseless door.
I will wait until I am covered totally . . .
And afterward we shall talk forevermore!

Only then will you know the reason, though immature
your flesh yet remains for such abysmal shrine,
you had to go down to sleep, with open eye.

Where fates are fixed there will be light, obscure;
you will learn that our connection bore an astral sign
and, with the vast pack broken, you had to die.

Este largo cansancio se hará mayor un día,
y el alma dirá al cuerpo que no quiere seguir
arrastrando su masa por la rosada vía,
por donde van los hombres, contentos de vivir.

Sentirás que a tu lado cavan briosamente,
que otra dormida llega a la quieta cuidad.
Esperaré que me hayan cubierto totalmente . . .
¡y después hablaremos por una eternidad!

Sólo entonces sabrás el porqué, no madura
para las hondas huesas tu carne todavía,
tuviste que bajar, sin fatiga, a dormir.

Se hará luz en la zona de los sinos, oscura;
sabrás que en nuestra alianza signo de astros había
y, roto el pacto enorme, tenías que morir . . .

Not As One, But As A Tribe

Definition 11. “Poetry is a series of explanations of life, fading off into horizons too swift for explanations.”

Carl Sandburg

Let Me Tell You What A Poem Brings

by Juan Felipe Herrera

Before you go further,
let me tell you what a poem brings,
first, you must know the secret, there is no poem
to speak of, it is a way to attain a life without boundaries,
yes, it is that easy, a poem, imagine me telling you this,
instead of going day by day against the razors, well,
the judgments, all the tick-tock bronze, a leather jacket
sizing you up, the fashion mall, for example, from
the outside you think you are being entertained,
when you enter, things change, you get caught by surprise,
your mouth goes sour, you get thirsty, your legs grow cold
standing still in the middle of a storm, a poem, of course,
is always open for business too, except, as you can see,
it isn’t exactly business that pulls your spirit into
the alarming waters, there you can bathe, you can play,
you can even join in on the gossip—the mist, that is,
the mist becomes central to your existence.

Sonnet 9

by Carl Sandburg

Fair is the rising morn when o’er the sky
The orient sun expands his roseate ray,
And lovely to the Bard’s enthusiast eye
Fades the meek radiance of departing day;
But fairer is the smile of one we love,
Than all the scenes in Nature’s ample sway.
And sweeter than the music of the grove,
The voice that bids us welcome. Such delight
EDITH! is mine, escaping to thy sight
From the hard durance of the empty throng.
Too swiftly then towards the silent night
Ye Hours of happiness! ye speed along,
Whilst I, from all the World’s cold cares apart,
Pour out the feelings of my burthen’d heart.

There are blog posts I know I should end without commentary, let the poems speak for themselves. This is one of those posts, where my inner voice screams “Stop, you’ll ruin it,” and like an idiot, I ignore that voice and push on anyways.

I think there are many others, like myself, who find respite in poetry. I believe it is a global, powerful, informed group of individuals, who by their very nature, are diverse, complicated and have developed, maybe without even knowing it, their own definitions of poetry, like Carl Sandburg….

Not As One, But As A Tribe

by T. A. Fry

Not as one, but as a tribe
Held to a mark befit our bent,
With poets as our willing scribes.
A writ of civic sacraments.

A language we can all abide;
Like wind before a wild horse.
Ideas that sweep along our lives
Allegory to avail our course.

Who lauds our lyric heroes now?
Inspirer’s of a greater good.
Words to guide what we avow,
Signposts in a darkening wood.

What laureate shall stake their claim
As mirror to a better world?
And silence critics that proclaim
They alone turn sand to pearls.

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