Killers
I am singing to
Soft as a man with a dead child speaks;
Hard as a man in handcuffs,
Held where he cannot move: Under the
Are sixteen million men,
Chosen for shining teeth,
Sharp eyes, hard legs,
And a running of young warm blood in their wrists. And a red juice runs on the green grass;
And a red juice soaks the dark soil.
And the sixteen million are killing. . . and killing and killing. I never forget them day or night:
They beat on my head for memory of them;
They pound on my heart and I cry back to them,
To their homes and women, dreams and games. I wake in the night and smell the trenches,
And hear the low stir of sleepers in lines—Sixteen million sleepers and pickets in the dark:
Some of them long sleepers for always,
Some of them tumbling to sleep to-morrow for always,
Fixed in the drag of the world's heartbreak,
Eating and drinking, toiling. . . on a long job of killing.
Sixteen million men.
Carl Sandburg
Другие работы автора
Fog
The fog comes on little cat feet. It sits looking over harbor and city
Summer Stars
Bend low again, night of summer stars So near you are, sky of summer stars, So near, a long-arm man can pick off stars, Pick off what he wants in the sky bowl,
Lost
Desolate and lone All night long on the lake Where fog trails and mist creeps, The whistle of a boat Calls and cries unendingly, Like some lost child In tears and trouble Hunting the harbor's breast And the harbor's eyes
Murmurings In A Field Hospital
[They picked him up in the grass where he had lain two days in the rain with a piece of shrapnel in his lungs ]Come to me only with playthings now
