Sweet Home Chicago or Hog Butcher for the World

Just got home from four days in Chicago for some educational technology training. The city of Chicago fascinates me and just might be my favorite city in the country. (Sorry, Vegas).  It's not without faults, of course (I can't lie, I loathe the Cubs and all their die hard fanatics), but it's a fascinating and exciting place.

I was there last summer for a month-long seminar about teaching poetry, which was when I started truly enjoying reading poetry for the first time in my life. So maybe that's the connection--maybe that's why I like it so much there. There are certainly millions of poems hiding in those crowded city streets. Every time I go back, I discover new ones.

Who knows if I'll end up back there again someday, or for how long of a time (I certainly ate enough hot dogs this time to sustain me for a good few years), but when I do I know new poems will be there waiting for me to read and to write.

What better to share than two Carl Sandburg poems after returning from the place where he wrote some of his most famous poetry?

The Road and the End

BY CARL SANDBURG

I shall foot it

Down the roadway in the dusk,

Where shapes of hunger wander

And the fugitives of pain go by.

I shall foot it

In the silence of the morning,

See the night slur into dawn,

Hear the slow great winds arise

Where tall trees flank the way

And shoulder toward the sky.

The broken boulders by the road

Shall not commemorate my ruin.

Regret shall be the gravel under foot.

I shall watch for

Slim birds swift of wing

That go where wind and ranks of thunder

Drive the wild processionals of rain.

The dust of the travelled road

Shall touch my hands and face.

Languages

BY CARL SANDBURG

THERE are no handles upon a language

Whereby men take hold of it

And mark it with signs for its remembrance.

It is a river, this language,

Once in a thousand years

Breaking a new course

Changing its way to the ocean.

It is mountain effluvia

Moving to valleys

And from nation to nation

Crossing borders and mixing.

Languages die like rivers.

Words wrapped round your tongue today

And broken to shape of thought

Between your teeth and lips speaking

Now and today

Shall be faded hieroglyphics

Ten thousand years from now.

Sing—and singing—remember

Your song dies and changes

And is not here to-morrow

Any more than the wind

Blowing ten thousand years ago.

I am not sure which one I like best, I just know I like his use of free verse and metaphor, not to mention the
use of a great word like "effluvia." Finally, for all you fellow classroom teachers out there, I can't talk about
Sandburg without mentioning that one of my all-time favorite poems to use with young students will always
be "Fog."