6.1.2025 – belongs to a church …

belongs to a church …
on certain Sundays enjoys
chanting Nicene creed

This is the Nicene Creed …

I believe in one God,
the Father almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all things visible and invisible.

I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the Only Begotten Son of God,
born of the Father before all ages.
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father;
through him all things were made.
For us men and for our salvation
he came down from heaven,
and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary,
and became man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate,
he suffered death and was buried,
and rose again on the third day
in accordance with the Scriptures.
He ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory
to judge the living and the dead
and his kingdom will have no end.

I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son,
who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified,
who has spoken through the prophets.

I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.
I confess one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins
and I look forward to the resurrection of the dead
and the life of the world to come.

Amen.

This may be the key phrase …

He will come again in glory
to judge the living and the dead
and his kingdom will have no end.

Onion Days in Chicago Poems by Carl Sandburg, (1916)

Mrs. Gabrielle Giovannitti comes along Peoria Street every morning at nine o’clock
With kindling wood piled on top of her head, her eyes looking straight ahead to find the way for her old feet.

Her daughter-in-law, Mrs. Pietro Giovannitti, whose husband was killed in a tunnel explosion through the negligence of a fellow-servant,
Works ten hours a day, sometimes twelve, picking onions for Jasper on the Bowmanville road.

She takes a street car at half-past five in the morning, Mrs. Pietro Giovannitti does,
And gets back from Jasper’s with cash for her day’s work, between nine and ten o’clock at night.

Last week she got eight cents a box, Mrs. Pietro Giovannitti, picking onions for Jasper,
But this week Jasper dropped the pay to six cents a box because so many women and girls were answering the ads in the Daily News.

Jasper belongs to an Episcopal church in Ravenswood and on certain Sundays
He enjoys chanting the Nicene creed with his daughters on each side of him joining their voices with his.

If the preacher repeats old sermons of a Sunday, Jasper’s mind wanders to his 700-acre farm and how he can make it produce more efficiently
And sometimes he speculates on whether he could word an ad in the Daily News so it would bring more women and girls out to his farm and reduce operating costs.

Mrs. Pietro Giovannitti is far from desperate about life; her joy is in a child she knows will arrive to her in three months.

And now while these are the pictures for today there are other pictures of the Giovannitti people I could give you for to-morrow,
And how some of them go to the county agent on winter mornings with their baskets for beans and cornmeal and molasses.

I listen to fellows saying here’s good stuff for a novel or it might be worked up into a good play.

I say there’s no dramatist living can put old Mrs. Gabrielle Giovannitti into a play with that kindling wood piled on top of her head coming along Peoria Street nine o’clock in the morning.

I repeat, this is the key phrase …

He will come again in glory
to judge the living and the dead
and his kingdom will have no end.

The Jasper’s of this world can hear if they want to.

3.20.2025 – these are heroes then

these are heroes then
on the street you see them
who will die fighting

These are heroes then — among the plain people—
Heroes, did you say? And why not? They
give all they’ve got and ask no questions and
take what comes and what more do you
want?

On the street you can see them any time, some
with jobs, some nothing doing, here a down-
and-out, there a game fighter who will die
fighting

From the The People, Yes: #19 by Carl Sandburg (Harcourt, Brace and Co., New York, 1936).

Asking that simple question, while the Bible saws way back even in the OLD Testament:

Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner. I am the Lord your God. (Leviticus 19:10)

Note the poor AND the foreigner!

So why do Republicans hate the poor and the foreigner?

To whom much is given … much will be … they know the rest and persist.

Here is the complete #19 of The People, Yes!

The people, yes, the people.

Everyone who got a letter today
And those the mail-carrier missed.
The women at the cookstoves preparing meals,
in a sewing corner mending, in a basement
laundering, woman the homemaker.

The women at the factory tending a stitching
machine, some of them the mainstay of the
jobless man at home cooking, laundering.
Streetwalking jobhunters, walkers alive and keen,
sleepwalkers drifting along, the stupefied and
hopeless down-and-outs, the game fighters
who will die fighting,

Walkers reading signs and stopping to study
windows, the signs and windows aimed
straight at their eyes, their wants,

Women in and out of doors to look and feel, to
try on, to buy and take away, to order and
have it charged and delivered, to pass by on
account of price and conditions.

The shopping crowds, the newspaper circulation.
the bystanders who witness parades, who
meet the boat, the tram, who throng in
wave lines to a fire, an explosion, an accident—
The people, yes—

Their shoe soles wearing holes in stone steps, their
hands and gloves wearing soft niches in ban-
isters of granite, two worn foot-tracks at the
general-delivery window.

Driving their cars, stop and go, red light, green
light, and the law of the traffic cop’s fingers,
on their way, loans and mortgages, margins to
cover.

Payments on the car, the bungalow, the radio, the
electric icebox, accumulated interest on loans
for past payments, the writhing point of
where the money will come from,

Crime thrown m their eyes from every angle,
crimes against property and person, crime in
the prints and films, crime as a lurking
shadow ready to spring into reality, crime as
a method and a technic.

Comedy as an offset to crime, the laughmakers,
the odd numbers m the news and the movies,
original clowns and imitators, and in the best
you never know what’s coming next even
when it’s hokum.

And sports, how a muff in the seventh lost yes-
terday’s game and now they are learning to
hit Dazzy’s fadeaway ball and did you hear
how Foozly plowed through that line for a
touchdown this afternoon^

And daily the death toll of the speed wagons, a
cripple a minute in fenders, wheels, steel and
glass splinters, a stammering witness before a
coroner’s jury, ‘It happened so sudden I
don’t know what happened “

And in the air a decree life is a gamble, take a
chance, you pick a number and see what you
get anything can happen in this sweepstakes
around the corner may be prosperity or the
worst depression yet who knows? nobody:
you pick a number, you draw a card, you
shoot the bones

In the poolrooms the young hear, “‘Ashes to
ashes, dust to dust, If the women don’t get
you then the whiskey must,” and in the
churches, “We walk by faith and not by sight,”
Often among themselves in their sessions of can-
dor the young saying, “Everything’s a racket,
only the gyp artists get by ”

And over and beyond the latest crime or comedy
always that relentless meal ticket saying
don’t-lose-me, hold your job, glue your mind
on that job or when your last nickel is gone
you live on your folks or sign for relief,

And the terror of these unknowns is a circle of
black ghosts holding men and women in toil
and danger, and sometimes shame, beyond
the dreams of their blossom days, the days
before they set out on their own

What IS this “occupational disease” we hear
about? It’s a sickness that breaks your health
on account of the work you’re in That’s all
Another kind of work and you’d have been
as good as any of them You’d have been
your old self

And what is this “hazardous occupation”? Why
that’s where you’re liable to break your neck
or get smashed on the job so you’re no good
on that job any more and that’s why you
can’t get any regular life insurance so long as
you’re on that job

These are heroes then — among the plain people—
Heroes, did you say? And why not? They
give all they’ve got and ask no questions and
take what comes and what more do you
want?

On the street you can see them any time, some
with jobs, some nothing doing, here a down-
and-out, there a game fighter who will die
fighting.

3.18.2025 – are vast and complex

are vast and complex
reaches between cat feet of
Fog and Remembrance Rock

Adapted from a letter by James Thurber to a Librarian in Asheville, North Carolina on January 30th, 1952, where Thurber writes:

Nobody ever gives me time to get things done, and such a project as yours can’t be batted off. I wouldn’t want to start writing in January something about Carl Sandburg to be finished in January. He may seem as easy to describe as a face carved on a mountain, but there are vast and complex reaches between the cat feet of the “Fog” and ‘‘Remembrance Rock.” I like to think of him informally, without putting on my stiff Sunday critical shirt and shoes. He was up here not too long ago, playing his guitar and singing, sometimes with me, late into the night, although it seemed early. I was proud to have taught him a new verse about Casey Jones, who went through Toledo on an open switch. He is an American institution, not easy to describe within the limits of January. Let the glib boys do that, and give him my love and fond wishes that he will go on forever.

Mr. Thurber also remembered the evening singing with Sandburg with a drawing.

Just fun thinking of the two of them in the same room.

Fog you ask??

Fog is …

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

Remembrance Rock is Carl Sandburg’s only novel. Sandburg described it as an epic, weaving the mystery of the American Dream with the costly toil and bloody struggles that gone to keep alive and carry further that Dream.

And there are vast and complex reaches between the two.

3.2.2025 – be dizzy now turn

be dizzy now turn
your head upside down see how
world looks upside down

Spring is when the grass turns green and glad.
Spring is when the new grass comes up and says, “Hey, hey!
Hey, hey!”
Be dizzy now and turn your head upside down and see how
the world looks upside down.
Be dizzy now and turn a cartwheel, and see the good earth
through a cartwheel.

Tell your feet the alphabet.
Tell your feet the multiplication table.
Tell your feet where to go, and, and watch ‘em go and come back.

Can you dance a question mark?
Can you dance an exclamation point?
Can you dance a couple of commas?
And bring it to a finish with a period?

Can you dance like the wind is pushing you?
Can you dance like you are pushing the wind?
Can you dance with slow wooden heels
and then change to bright and singing silver heels?
Such nice feet, such good feet.

Lines Written for Gene Kelly To Dance To by Carl Sandburg as published in The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg (revised and updated).

Dancing feet?

Such good feet?

Spring is when the grass turns green and glad.

Spring is when the new grass comes up and says, “Hey, hey!
Hey, hey!”

Spring is when the new grass puts so much pollen in the air that I am dizzy now and I turn my head upside down and see how the world looks upside down and can’t breath and think my head is going to explode.

I can’t dance a question mark?

I can’t dance an exclamation point?

I can’t dance a couple of commas?

And I can’t bring it to a finish with a period?

I can’t even breath.

2.15.2025 – be different

be different
from other people – easy …
being different

Tell him to be different from other people
if it comes natural and easy being different.

So writes Carl Sandburg in his poem, “A Father To His Son.”

It was Dale Carnegie, a man who knew how to win friends, who said, “If you want to be interesting, be interested.”

My Dad was interested in everything.

If that made him a little different, then it was natural and easy for him to be different.

He bought books by the armload and filled our house with books.

He bought records and made tape recordings of music and filled our house with music.

He bought stereo record players and speakers by the boxful and wired up speakers around the house and filled our house with sound.

He bought art by the square yard and covered the walls of our house with original paintings and prints of his favorite Andrew Wyeth.

He wrote in a letter home during World War 2 to his future wife that he ‘liked to live in the WHOLE house,’ no rooms just for show and that is how he lived.

My Dad was interested in everything and to me it made him different from other people.

It was a difference that came natural and easy to Dad.

And for me, he encouraged me to be interested and by extension, different.

(In that respect, he succeeded beyond any dreams.)

But, he didn’t push his interests on me.

He made interesting things available and if I showed interest, he would encourage that interest.

Dad liked historical venues.

He wanted to see them, so we got to see them.

He wanted to see Hartwick Pines State Park up in northern lower Michigan.

So we got to see Hartwick Pines State Park up in northern lower Michigan.

Dad wanted to pose us on a display of the BIG WHEELS used to cart giant White Pines to the lumber yard.

So we posed on the BIG WHEELS as a family.

Some years later, when we were all a little older, Dad thought that a visit to see Hartwick Pines State Park up in northern lower Michigan would be a nice summer day trip.

So we all went to see Hartwick Pines State Park up in northern lower Michigan for a nice summer day trip.

Dad wanted us to pose on the BIG WHEELS.

Notice, this year, Dad is in the picture.

This year, I had shown some in interest in photography.

Dad encouraged my interest.

I had my own camera, a little Kodak.

Dad had his Nikon.

I wanted to use the Nikon.

Dad let me, and I took this family picture on the BIG WHEELS.

I got to use the Nikon.

Dad trusted me.

Though my brothers and sisters look a little bit of the oh-brother-brother-mike-again, I don’t think Dad minded too much.

Even when the picture came back from the lab and it was evident that I need to work on my focus skills.

He would have found that interesting.

Happy birthday to my Dad.

105 today!

Here is the complete poem by Mr. Sandburg.

A Father To His Son

A father sees his son nearing manhood.
What shall he tell that son?
“Life is hard; be steel; be a rock.”
And this might stand him for the storms
and serve him for humdrum monotony
and guide him among sudden betrayals
and tighten him for slack moments.
“Life is a soft loam; be gentle; go easy.”
And this too might serve him.
Brutes have been gentled where lashes failed.
The growth of a frail flower in a path up
has sometimes shattered and split a rock.
A tough will counts. So does desire.
So does a rich soft wanting.
Without rich wanting nothing arrives.
Tell him too much money has killed men
and left them dead years before burial:
the quest of lucre beyond a few easy needs
has twisted good enough men
sometimes into dry thwarted worms.
Tell him time as a stuff can be wasted.
Tell him to be a fool every so often
and to have no shame over having been a fool
yet learning something out of every folly
hoping to repeat none of the cheap follies
thus arriving at intimate understanding
of a world numbering many fools.
Tell him to be alone often and get at himself
and above all tell himself no lies about himself
whatever the white lies and protective fronts
he may use against other people.
Tell him solitude is creative if he is strong
and the final decisions are made in silent rooms.
Tell him to be different from other people
if it comes natural and easy being different.
Let him have lazy days seeking his deeper motives.
Let him seek deep for where he is born natural.
Then he may understand Shakespeare
and the Wright brothers, Pasteur, Pavlov,
Michael Faraday and free imaginations
Bringing changes into a world resenting change.
He will be lonely enough
to have time for the work
he knows as his own.

Carl Sandburg, in The People Yes as published in The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg, by Carl Sandburg, Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1950.