OLD WOMAN
THE owl-car clatters along, dogged by the echo / From building and battered paving-stone.
THEY WILL SAY
❦
OF my city the worst that men will ever say is this:
You took little children away from the sun and the dew,
And the glimmers that played in the grass under the great sky,
And the reckless rain; you put them between walls
To work, broken and smothered, for bread and wages,
To eat dust in their throats and die empty-hearted
For a little handful of pay on a few Saturday nights.
More poems by Carl Sandburg
KILLERS
I AM singing to you / Soft as a man with a dead child speaks;
PALS
TAKE a hold now / On the silver handles here,
JACK
JACK was a swarthy, swaggering son-of-a-gun. / He worked thirty years on the railroad, ten hours a day,