2.14.2022 – place where love begins

place where love begins
a touch of two hands that foils
all dictionaries

For Valentine’s Day, 2022 from Carl Sandbug.

Explanations of Love
Carl Sandburg

There is a place where love begins and a place
where love ends.

There is a touch of two hands that foils all dictionaries.

There is a look of eyes fierce as a big Bethlehem open hearth
furnace or a little green-fire acetylene torch.

There are single careless bywords portentous as a
big bend in the Mississippi River.

Hands, eyes, bywords–out of these love makes
battlegrounds and workshops.

There is a pair of shoes love wears and the coming
is a mystery.

There is a warning love sends and the cost of it
is never written till long afterward.

There are explanations of love in all languages
and not one found wiser than this:

There is a place where love begins and a place
where love ends—and love asks nothing.

And, BTW, this is the poem that Leslie agreed to have printed on the back our the program guides that were passed out at our wedding.

2.12.2022 – saying yes to the

saying yes to the
paradoxes democracy
hopes of government

Salutations on the aniiversary of your birth, Mr. Lincoln.

In remembrance I offer Carl Sandburg’s 1936 poem, Lincoln?

He was a mystery in smoke and flags
Saying yes to the smoke, yes to the flags,
Yes to the paradoxes of democracy,
Yes to the hopes of government
Of the people by the people for the people,
No to debauchery of the public mind,
No to personal malice nursed and fed,
Yes to the Constitution when a help,
No to the Constitution when a hindrance
Yes to man as a struggler amid illusions,
Each man fated to answer for himself:
Which of the faiths and illusions of mankind
Must I choose for my own sustaining light
To bring me beyond the present wilderness?

       Lincoln? Was he a poet?
       And did he write verses?
“I have not willingly planted a thorn
       in any man’s bosom.”
I shall do nothing through malice: what
       I deal with is too vast for malice.”

Death was in the air.
So was birth.

2.4.2022 – saw morning paper

saw morning paper
first page back page inside page
saw the world go by

From the poem, Moon Rider by Carl Sandburg published in Poetry – A Magazine of Verse in March of 1922.

Mr. Sandburg wrote these lines 100 years ago.

The man opened the morning paper: saw the first page,
The back page, the inside pages, the editorials;
Saw the world go by, eating, stealing, fighting;
Saw the headlines, date-lines, funnies, ads,
The marching movies of the workmen going to work, the workmen striking,

I start my day with the morning papers on online.

I see the front pages, the back page and the inside pages.

I see the world go by.

It is the first line of the poem that sticks with me.

WHAT have I saved out of a morning?
The earliest of the morning came with moon-mist
And the travel of a moon-spilt purple:

All those pages.

All that reading.

And I can’t remember a dang thing of what I read.

1.2.2022 – go to the window

go to the window
watch wait and know the coming
of a little love

But leave me a little love.

A voice to speak to me in the day end.

Based on the closing lines of the poem, At the Window, by Carl Sandburg.

Give me hunger,
O you gods that sit and give
The world its orders.
Give me hunger, pain and want,
Shut me out with shame and failure
From your doors of gold and fame,
Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!

But leave me a little love,
A voice to speak to me in the day end,
A hand to touch me in the dark room
Breaking the long loneliness.
In the dusk of day-shapes
Blurring the sunset,
One little wandering, western star
Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow.
Let me go to the window,
Watch there the day-shapes of dusk
And wait and know the coming
Of a little love.

12.19.2021 – swaddling clothes on hay

swaddling clothes on hay
in a barn why the story
never does wear out?

Adapted from the poem, The Silver Star, by Carl Sandburg.

The complete poem reads:

The silver of one star
Plays cross-lights against pine green.

And the play of this silver
crosswise against the green
is an old story…..
thousands of years.

And sheep raisers on the hills by night
Watching the wooly four-footed ramblers,
Watching a single silver star—
Why does the story never wear out?

And a baby slung in a feed-box
Back in a barn in a Bethlehem slum,
A baby’s first cry mixing with the crunch
Of a mule’s teeth on Bethlehem Christmas corn,
Baby fists softer than snowflakes of Norway,

The vagabond Mother of Christ
And the vagabond men of wisdom,
All in a barn on a winter night,
And a baby there in swaddling clothes on hay—
Why does the story never wear out?

The sheen of it all
Is a star silver and a pine green
For the heart of a child asking a story,
The red and hungry, red and hankering heart
Calling for cross-lights of silver and green.