PERSONALITY

Musings of a Police Reporter in the Identification Bureau

YOU have loved forty women, but you have only one thumb.
You have led a hundred secret lives, but you mark only
one thumb.
You go round the world and fight in a thousand wars and
win all the world's honors, but when you come back
home the print of the one thumb your mother gave
you is the same print of thumb you had in the old
home when your mother kissed you and said good-by.
Out of the whirling womb of time come millions of men
and their feet crowd the earth and they cut one anothers'
throats for room to stand and among them all
are not two thumbs alike.
Somewhere is a Great God of Thumbs who can tell the
inside story of this.

More poems by Carl Sandburg

OLD WOMAN

THE owl-car clatters along, dogged by the echo / From building and battered paving-stone.

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SHEEP

Thousands of sheep, soft-footed, black-nosed sheep-- / one by one going up the hill and over the fence--one by

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THE HARBOR

PASSING through huddled and ugly walls / By doorways where women

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STATISTICS

NAPOLEON shifted, / Restless in the old sarcophagus

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All poems by Carl Sandburg →