The People, Yes
Page 23
only history, only tomorrow, knows
for every revolution breaks
as a child of its own convulsive hour
shooting patterns never told of beforehand”?
103
The wind in the corn leaves among the naked stalks
and the assurances of the October comhuskers
throwing the yellow and gold ears into wagons
and the weatherworn boards of the oblong comcribs
and the heavy boots of winter roaring
around the barn doors
and the cows drowsing in peace at the feed-boxes—
while sheet steel is riveted into ships and bridges
and the hangar night shift meets the air mail
and the steam shovels scoop gravel by the ton
and the interstate trucks parade on the hard roads
and the bread line silhouettes stand in a drizzle
and in Iowa the state fair prize hog crunches com
and on the truck farms this year’s scarecrows
lose the clothes they wore this summer
and stand next year in a change of rags—
these are chapters interwoven of the people.
When a slow dim light moves
on the face of vast waters
and in its slow dim changing
baffles keen old captains
the reading of the light
in its shifdng resolves
is the same as trying to read
the hosts of circumstance
deepening the paths of acuon
with a decree for the people:
“Tomorrow you do this because
you can do nothing else.”
What is it now
in the hosts of circumstance
where plainspoken men multiply,
what is it now the people are saying
near enough to the ribs of life
and the flowing face of vast waters
so they will go on saying it
in deepening paths of action
running toward a slow dim decree:
“You do this because
you can do nothing else”?
104
When was it long ago the murmurings began
and the joined murmurings
became a moving wall
moving with the authority of a great sea
whose Yes and No
stood in an awful script
in a new unheard-of handwriting?
“No longer,” began the murmurings,
“shall the king be king
“nor the son of the king become king.
“Their authority shall go
“and their thrones be swept away.
“They are too far from us, the people.
“They listen too little to us, the people.
“They hold their counsels
“without men from the people given a word.
“Their ears are so far from us,
“so far from our wants and small belongings,
“we must trim the kings
“into something less than kings.”
And the joined murmurings became a moving wall
with Yes and No in an awful script.
And the kings became less.
The kings shrank.
What is it now
the people are beginning
to say—
is it this?
and if so
whither away and
where do we go
from here?
“What about the munitions and money kings,
the war lords and international bankers?
the transportation and credit kings?
the coal, the oil, and the mining kings?
the price-fixing monopoly control kings?
Why are they so far from us?
why do they hold their counsels
without men from the people given a word?
Shall we keep these kings and let their sons
in time become the same manner of kings?
Are their results equal to their authority?
Why are these interests too sacred for discussion?
What documents now call for holy daylight?
what costs, prices, values, are we forbidden to ask?
Are we slowly coming to understand
the distinction between a demagogue squawking
and the presentation of tragic plainspoken fact?
Shall a robber be named a robber when he is one
even though bespoken and anointed he is?
Shall a shame and a crime be mentioned
when it is so plainly there,
when day by day it draws toil, blood, and hunger,
enough of slow death and personal tragedy to certify
the kings who sit today as entrenched kings
are far too far from their people?
What does justice say?
or if justice is become an abstraction or a harlot
what does her harder sister, necessity, say?
Their ears are so far from us,
so far from our wants and small belongings
we must trim these kings of our time
into something less than kings.
Of these too it will be written:
these kings shrank.”
What is it now
the people are beginning
to say—
is it this?
and if so
whither away and
where do we go from here?
105
Always the storm of propaganda blows.
Buy a paper. Read a book. Start the radio.
Listen in the railroad car, in the bus,
Go to church, to a movie, to a saloon.
And always the breezes of personal opinion
are blowing mixed with the doctrines
of propaganda or the chatter of selling spiels.
Believe this, believe that. Buy these, buy them.
Love one-two-three, hate four-five-six.
Remember 7-8-9, forget 10-11-12.
Go now, don’t wait, go now at once and buy
Dada Salts Incorporated, Crazy Horse Crystals,
for whatever ails you and if nothing ails you
it is good for that and we are telling you
for your own good. Whatever you are told,
you are told it is for your own good and not
for the special interest of those telling you.
Planned economy is forethought and care.
Planned economy is regimentation and tyranny.
What do you know about planned economy
and how did this argument get started and why?
Let the argument go on.
The storm of propaganda blows always.
In every air of today the germs float and hover.
The shock and contact of ideas goes on.
Planned economy will arrive, stand up,
and stay a long time—or planned economy will
take a beating and be smothered.
The people have the say-so.
Let the argument go on.
Let the people listen.
Tomorrow the people say Yes or No by one question:
“What else can be done?”
In the drive of faiths on the wind today the people know:
“We have come far and we are going farther yet.”
Who was the quiet silver-toned agitator who
said he loved every stone of the streets of
Boston, who was a believer in sidewalks, and
had it, “The talk of the sidewalk today is
the law of the land tomorrow”?
“The people,” said a farmer’s wife in a Minnesota country store while her husband was buying a new post-hole digger,
“The people,” she went on, “will stick around a long time.
“The people run the works, only they don’t know it yet—you wait
and see.”
Who knows the answers, the cold inviolable truth?
And when have the paid and professional liars done else than bring wrath and fire, wreck and doom?
And how few they are who search and hesitate and say:
“I stand in this whirlpool and tell you I don’t know and if I did know I would tell you and all I am doing now is to guess and I give you my guess for what it is worth as one man’s guess.
“Yet I have worked out this guess for myself as nobody’s yes-man and when it happens I no longer own the priceless little piece of territory under my own hat, so far gone that I can’t even do my own guessing for myself,
“Then I will know I am one of the unburied dead, one of the moving walking stalking talking unburied dead.”
106
Sleep is a suspension midway
and a conundrum of shadows
lose in meadows of the moon.
The people sleep.
Ai! ai! the people sleep.
Yet the sleepers toss in sleep
and an end comes of sleep
and the sleepers wake.
Ai! ai! the sleepers wake!
107
The people will live on.
The learning and blundering people will live on.
They will be tricked and sold and again sold
And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,
The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback.
You can’t laugh off their capacity to take it.
The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas.
The people so often sleepy, weary, enigmatic,
is a vast huddle with many units saying:
“I earn my living.
I make enough to get by
and it takes all my time.
If I had more time
I could do more for myself
and maybe for others.
I could read and study
and talk things over
and find out about things.
It takes time.
I wish I had the time.”
The people is a tragic and comic two-face:
hero and hoodlum: phantom and gorilla twisting
to moan with a gargoyle mouth: “They
buy me and sell me . . . it’s a game . . .
sometime I’ll break loose . . .”
Once having marched
Over the margins of animal necessity,
Over the grim line of sheer subsistence
Then man came
To the deeper rituals of his bones,
To the lights lighter than any bones,
To the time for thinking things over,
To the dance, the song, the story,
Or the hours given over to dreaming,
Once having so marched
Between the finite limitations of the five senses
and the endless yearnings of man for the beyond
the people hold to the humdrum bidding of work and food
while reaching out when it comes their way
for lights beyond the prisms of the five senses,
for keepsakes lasting beyond any hunger or death.
This reaching is alive.
The panderers and liars have violated and smutted it.
Yet this reaching is alive yet
for lights and keepsakes.
The people know the salt of the sea
and the strength of the winds
lashing the corners of the earth.
The people take the earth
as a tomb of rest and a cradle of hope.
Who else speaks for the Family of Man?
They are in tune and step
with constellations of universal law.
The people is a polychrome,
spectrum and a prism
held in a moving monolith,
a console organ of changing themes,
a clavilux of color poems
wherein the sea offers fog
and the fog moves off in rain
and the labrador sunset shortens
to a nocturne of clear stars
serene over the shot spray
of northern lights.
The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise.
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for
keeps, the people march:
“Where to? what next?”
About the Author
CARL SANDBURG (1878–1967) was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize, first in 1940 for his biography of Abraham Lincoln and again in 1951 for Complete Poems. Before becoming known as a poet, he worked as a milkman, an ice harvester, a dishwasher, a salesman, a fireman, and a journalist. Among his classics are the Rootabaga Stories, which he wrote for his young daughters at the beginning of his long and distinguished literary career.