The People, Yes Read online

  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.