5 ποιήματα του Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)

Διαβάζει ο ίδιος σε ηχογραφήσεις του 1951-1952.
Πηγή: Caedmon Poetry, Carl Sandburg reads (2MC)

Ακούστε τον:

White Ash



There is a woman on Michigan Boulevard keeps a parrot and goldfish and two white mice.
She used to keep a houseful of girls in kimonos and three pushbuttons on the front door.
Now she is alone with a parrot and goldfish and two white mice … but these are some of her thoughts:
The love of a soldier on furlough or a sailor on shore leave burns with a bonfire red and saffron.
The love of an emigrant workman whose wife is a thousand miles away burns with a blue smoke.
The love of a young man whose sweetheart married an older man for money burns with a sputtering uncertain flame.
And there is a love … one in a thousand … burns clean and is gone leaving a white ash.…
And this is a thought she never explains to the parrot and goldfish and two white mice.


They All Want to Play Hamlet



They all want to play Hamlet.
They have not exactly seen their fathers killed
Nor their mothers in a frame-up to kill,
Nor an Ophelia dying with a dust gagging the heart,
Not exactly the spinning circles of singing golden spiders,
Not exactly this have they got at nor the meaning of flowers
--O flowers, flowers slung by a dancing girl—
in the saddest play the inkfish, Shakespeare ever wrote;
Yet they all want to play Hamlet because it is sad like all actors are sad and to stand by an open grave with a joker’s skull in the hand and then to say over slow and say over slow wise, keen, beautiful words masking a heart that’s breaking, breaking,
This is something that calls and calls to their blood.
They are acting when they talk about it and they know it is acting to be particular about it and yet: They all want to play Hamlet.


Cahoots



Play it across the table.
What if we steal this city blind?
If they want anything let ‘em nail it down.

Harness bulls, dicks, front office men,
And the high goats up on the bench,
Ain’t they all in cahoots?
Ain’t it fifty-fifty all down the line,
Petemen, dips, boosters, stick-ups and guns—what’s to hinder?

Go fifty-fifty.

If they nail you call in a mouthpiece.
Fix it, you gazump, you slant-head, fix it.
Feed ‘em …

Nothin’ ever sticks to my fingers, nah, nah, nothin’ like that,
But there ain’t no law we got to wear mittens—huh—is there?
Mittens, that’s a good one—mittens!

There oughta be a law everybody wear mittens.


Mag



I wish to God I never saw you, Mag.
I wish you never quit your job and came along with me.
I wish we never bought a license and a white dress
For you to get married in the day we ran off to a minister
And told him we would love each other and take care of each other
Always and always long as the sun and the rain lasts anywhere.
Yes, I’m wishing now you lived somewhere away from here
And I was a bum on the bumpers a thousand miles away dead broke.
I wish the kids had never come
And rent and coal and clothes to pay for
And a grocery man calling for cash,
Every day cash for beans and prunes.
I wish to God I never saw you, Mag.
I wish to God the kids had ...


Fog



The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.


Ομίχλη

Η ομίχλη έρχεται
γατοπατώντας.

Σαν σφίγγα κάθεται,
προσέχει το λιμάνι και την πόλη
και φεύγει πάλι.

FS/ATH IX/1996