Do you know my brother, the farmer?
Now he grows discouraged and weeps.
I saw him kneeling and praying alone, by a destroyed wheatfield.
It was the time of learning for me.
I fairly choked.
It was the beginning of faith in the gods for me.
Up now, little short-winded sister thing,
I’ll make love to you after awhile.
Save your strength.
Let’s be running.
Let’s be running.
See the trains in the long flat fields at night,
The screaming trains — yellow and black.
In and out of the land they go —
Yellow and black — screaming and shrieking.
Come, tired little sister, run with me.
Let’s lie down on this hill-side here.
Let our soft mid-western nights creep into you.
See the little things, creeping, creeping,
Hear, in the night, the little things creeping.
Let’s be creeping.
Let’s be creeping.
I’ve got a strong man’s love for you.
See the muscles of my legs — how tense.
Now I leap and cry like a strong young stallion.
Let’s away.
West of Chicago the endless cornfields.
Let’s be running.
Come away.
SONG FOR LONELY ROADS
Now let us understand each other, love,
Long time ago I crept off home,
To my own gods I went.
The tale is old,
It has been told
By many men in many lands.
The lands belong to those who tell.
Now surely that is clear.
After the plow had westward swept,
The gods bestowed the corn to stand.
Long, long it stood,
Strong, strong it grew,
To make a forest for new song.
Deep in the com the bargain hard
Youth with the gods drove home.
The gods remember,
Youth forgets.
Doubt not the soul of song that waits.
The singer dies,
The singer lives,
The gods wait in the corn,
The soul of song is in the land.
Lift up your lips to that.
SONG LONG AFTER
WAS THAT ALL you could do, Woman — loving and giving?
You went pretty far — I admire you for that. Do you remember the night in the upper room when he cried? He
needed you then — God knows he needed you then.
Down below the others were waiting — Judas and Peter and
John — old men — mighty wise. He was crucified for
them. At night when the stars came he went out alone
— long after that.
How did you know what you did know, Woman? That
puzzles me.
How could you go that far and stop?
Was that all you could do, Woman — loving and giving?
SONG OF THE SOUL OF CHICAGO
ON THE BRIDGES, on the bridges — swooping and rising, whirling and circling — back to the bridges, always the bridges.
I’ll talk forever — I’m damned if I’ll sing. Don’t you see
that mine is not a singing people? We’re just a lot of
muddy things caught up by the stream. You can’t fool
us. Don’t we know ourselves?
Here we are, out here in Chicago. You think we’re not
humble? You’re a liar. We are like the sewerage of our
town, swept up stream by a kind of mechanical triumph
— that’s what we are.
On the bridges, on the bridges — wagons and motors, horses
and men — not flying, just tearing along and swearing.
By God we’ll love each other or die trying. We’ll get to
understanding too. In some grim way our own song shall
work through.
We’ll stay down in the muddy depths of our stream — we
will. There can’t any poet come out here and sit on the
shaky rail of our ugly bridges and sing us into paradise.
We’re finding out — that’s what I want to say. We’ll get
at our own thing out here or die for it. We’re going
down, numberless thousands of us, into ugly oblivion.
We know that.
But say, bards, you keep off our bridges. Keep out of our
dreams, dreamers. We want to give this democracy thing
they talk so big about a whirl. We want to see if we
are any good out here, we Americans from all over hell.
That’s what we want.
SONG OF THE DRUNKEN BUSINESS MAN
Don’t try, little one, to keep hold of me,
Go home! There’s a place for you by the fire.
Age is waiting to welcome you there.
Go home and sit by the fire.
Into the naked street I ran,
Roaring and bellowing like a cow,
Shaking the walls of the houses down,
Proclaiming my dream of black desire.
If there’s a thing in this world that’s good it’s guts.
I’m a blackbird hovering over the land.
Go on home! Let me alone.
Do you know, little dove, I admire your lips —
They’re so red.
What are you doing out in the street?
Take my arm! Look at me!
Ah, you be gone. I’m sixty-five years old to-night.
Now what’s the use of beginning again?
SONG TO THE LAUGH
All night we lay in the cold and the rain in the midst of the
laughter,
The laughter of weaklings,
The laughter of women,
The laughter of those who were strong.
At the end of the lane we lay, beyond the roar and the
rattle.
Hark! In the silence the laughter!
Strong men creeping,
Old men creeping,
Old men and children, creeping and creeping
Far away in the darkness.
Edward, my son,
Thomas, my man,
Why do you creep all night in the darkness?
Why do you creep and wait to strike at night in the darkness?
Nine! Ten! Twelve!
Nine! Ten! Twelve!
Take the knife from the shield and strike in the darkness.
Strike, man! Strike!
All night we lay in the cold and wet at the edge of the
darkness.
Trembling with fear we prepared to welcome the knife
thrust.
Then we kissed and our bodies caressed.
We prepared, my beloved, to add our voices to those of the
others.
In the cold and wet we crept and laughed in the darkness.
HOSANNA
The cornfields shall be the mothers of men. They are rich
with the milk that shall suckle men. The bearded men
shall arise. They shall come sturdy and strong out of the
West.
You may prick the new men with spears. Their blood shall
run out on the snow but they are my men and shall
survive.
I am a child and I weep. My hands are red and cold.
I run along and blow upon them.
In me is the blood of the strong men. A little I have
endured and shall endure. I am of the blood of strong
bearded men. The milk of the com is in me.
Sweet, sweet, the thought of the new men. I am cold and
run through the streets of Chicago. I blow upon my red
hands. Sweet, sweet the thought of the new men.
WAR
Long lanes of fire, dead cornstalks
burning,
Run now — head downward — plunging and crying,
Hold hard the breath now,
Forward we run.
Out of Nebraska, on into Kansas, now the word runs,
Runs with the wind, runs with the news of war, crying and
screaming.
Now the word runs.
Out on low ridges, black ‘gainst the night sky;
Farmer boys running, factory boys running;
Boys from Ohio
And my Illinois.
Questions and answers, over the land,
Questions that hurt, answers that hurt,
Questions of courage
That cannot but hurt.
Deep in the cornfields the gods come to life,
Gods that have waited, gods that we knew not.
Gods come to life
In America now.
MID-AMERICAN PRAYER
I sang there — I dreamed there — I was suckled face downward in the black earth of my western cornland.
I remember as though it were yesterday how I first began
to stand up.
All about me the com — in the night the fields mysterious
and vast — voices of Indians — names remembered — murmurings of winds — the secret mutterings of my own
young boyhood and manhood.
The men and women among whom I lived destroyed my
ability to pray. The sons of New Englanders, who
brought books and smart sayings into our Mid-America,
destroyed the faith in me that came out of the ground.
But in my own way I crept out beyond that. I did pray —
in the night by a strip of broken rail fence — in the rain —
walking alone in meadows — in the hundred secret places
that youth knows I tried to find the way to gods. Now
you see how confusing life is.
There were my cornfields that I loved — what whisperings
there — what daring dreams — what deep hopes — what
memories of true old savages, Indians striving toward
gods, dancing and fighting and praying while they said
big words — medicine words.
And all this in the long cornfields.
And then in the fall the crackling of cornleaves, the smells,
sights and sounds.
The com stood up like armies in the shocks.
When I was a boy I went into the cornfields at night. I
said words I had not dared to say to people, defying the
New Englanders’ gods, trying to find honest, mid-western
American gods.
And all the time the fields spread west and west. An
empire was building.
Towns grew up, factories multiplied.
You see the com had come into its own but that destroyed
too.
I and my men stood up but we grew fat. We lived in
houses in cities and we forgot the fields and the praying
— the lurking sounds, sights, smells of old things.
Now I am ashamed and many of my men are ashamed.
I cannot tell how deep my shame lies.
I walk in the streets seeing my own well-clad body and my
fat hands with shame.
I am thinking of lean men fighting in many places over the
world. I am thinking of the voices of my own gods forgotten in the fields.
And now at last after my long fatness I begin to get the old
whisperings.
I go along here in Chicago praying and saying words. Not
the shouting and the waving of flags but something else
creeps into me.
You see, dear brothers of the world, I dream of new and
more subtile loves for me and my men.
My mind leaps forward and I think of the time when our
hands, no longer fat, may touch even the lean dear hands
of France, when we also have suffered and got back to
prayer.
Conceive if you will the mightiness of that dream, that these
fields and places, out here west of Pittsburgh, may become sacred places, that because of this terrible thing, of
which we may now become a part, there is hope of hardness and leanness — that we may get to lives of which we
may be unashamed.
Above the old half-lost shadows, that lurk over our cornfields, now something more than Indians that dance in
the moonlight.
Now older, older things — bearded Slavs dreaming far back,
stout Englishmen marching under Cromwell, Franks and
Celts, presently Scandinavians too.
These to our cornfields, the old dreams and prayers and
thoughts of these men sweetening our broad land and getting even into our shops and into the shadows that lurk
by our factory doors.
It is the time of the opening of doors.
No talk now of what we can do for the old world.
Talk and dream now of what the old world can bring to us
— the true sense of real suffering out of which may come
the sweeter brotherhood.
God, lead us to the fields now. Suns for us and rains for
us and a prayer for every growing thing.
May our fields become our sacred places.
May we have courage to choke with our man’s hate him who
would profit by the suffering of the world.
May we strip ourself clean and go hungry that after this
terrible storm has passed our sacred fields may feed German, Jew and Japanese.
May the sound of enmity die in the groaning of growing
things in our fields.
May we get to gods and the greater brotherhood through
growth springing out of the destruction of men.
For all of Mid-America the greater prayer and the birth of
humbleness.
WE ENTER IN
Now you see, brothers, here in the West, here’s how it is — We stand and fall, we hesitate —
It is all new to us,
To kill, to take a fellow’s life.
Uh! — a nauseous fever takes the light away.
Now we stand up and enter in.
The baseness of the deed we too embrace.
We go in dumbly — into that dark place.
The germ of death we take into our veins.
Do we not know that we ourselves have failed?
Our valleys wide, our long green fields
We have bestrewn with our own dead.
In shop and mart we have befouled our souls.
Our com is withered and our faces black
With smoke of hate.
We make the gesture and we go to die.
Had we been true to our own land our sweetness then had
quite remade the world.
We now are true to failure grim —
We go in prayer to die.
To our own souls we take the killer’s sin.
Into the waters black our souls we fling.
We take the chances of the broader dream.
Not ours but all the worlds — our fields.
We enter in.
DIRGE OF WAR
It begins with little creeping pains that run across the breast.
Good-bye, brother. I see your arm is withered and your
lusts are dead. I did not think the end would come so
soon. It has — good-bye.
In the night we remembered to believe in hell. Wide we
threw the window to behold the fog. Men stumbled in
the darkness — a cry arose — then came war.
Now, brother — let’s ponder — say we draw apart. Woman
come to fatherhood and the world upset. My little
naked soldiers are playing on the floor. I strike and bid
you go. If y
ou go, all is gone.
There is a thing you must do — let’s get back to that.
You must strike out alone, get out of this room. You
must go upon your journey. Don’t stay here — now be
gone — good-bye.
The gray and purple lesson of the night comes on. What
we dare not face must now come home to us. Hear the
guns — dull — in the night.
Back of us our fathers — let that go. Don’t confuse us
here — alone — with memories that can’t stand — and run
— in our night. I’ll tell you what I want — be still. — |
I want to creep and creep and lie face downward on the rim
of hell. I want your breathing body to be torn from me.
I want hell and guns to be stilled by the aching thrust of
new things into life. I want death perfect and new love
achieved. I want much.
Believe it or not I actually did run in the dusty hallways of
my own life before this began. I went into the long
empty halls, breathed the stale dust of all old things.
I knew and yet I did not know. That’s what I want to
say — by song and by the jarring note of song that cannot
sing.
I was coming with America — dreaming with America — hoping with America — then war came.
I’m an aching old thing and the dream come true. I am
sick with my last sickness here alone. I am creeping,
creeping, creeping — in the night — in the halls. I am
death — I am war: — I am hate.
And that’s all, brother. I dare not hope. The childishness
has left me. I am dead. Over the fields a shriek — a
cry. I pay my fare to hell — I die — I die.
LITTLE SONG TO A WESTERN STATESMAN
Well, I’m for you, little worm,
Coming to the surface of the ground on warm, wet days,
Digging deep down when it is dry and cold —
Who elected you to serve in the United States Senate, eh?
Say, you are funny in that black frock coat,
Funny as me, with my fat cheeks and brown woven coat too.
Where’d we get our clothes?
Who made them for us?
You must get serious, now and then,
In the night when it is dark and wild winds blow.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 320