Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, POTATO BLOSSOM SONGS AND JIGS, by CARL SANDBURG


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

POTATO BLOSSOM SONGS AND JIGS, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: Rum tiddy um
Last Line: "let romance stutter to the western stars, ""excuse ... Me..."


RUM tiddy um,
tiddy um,
tiddy um tum tum.
My knees are loose-like, my feet want to sling their selves.
I feel like tickling you under the chin -- honey -- and
a-asking: Why Does
a Chicken Cross the Road?
When the hens are a-laying eggs, and the roosters pluck-pluck-put-akut
and you -- honey -- put new potatoes and gravy on the table, and there
ain't too much rain or too little:
Say, why do I feel so gabby?
Why do I want to holler all over the place?
.....
Do you remember I held empty hands to you
and I said all is yours
the handfuls of nothing?
.....
I ask you for white blossoms.
I bring a concertina after sunset under the apple trees.
I bring out "The Spanish Cavalier" and "In the Gloaming, O My
Darling."

The orchard here is near and home-like.
The oats in the valley run a mile.
Between are the green and marching potato vines.
The lightning bugs go criss-cross carrying a zigzag of fire: the
potato bugs are asleep under their stiff and yellow-striped wings:
here romance stutters to the western stars, "Excuse ... me..."
.....
Old foundations of rotten wood.
An old barn done-for and out of the wormholes ten-legged roaches shook
up and scared by sunlight.
So a pickax digs a long tooth with a short memory.
Fire can not eat this rubbish till it has lain in the sun.
.....
The story lags.
The story has no connections.
The story is nothing but a lot of banjo plinka planka plunks.

The roan horse is young and will learn: the roan horse buckles into
harness and feels the foam on the collar at the end of a haul: the
roan horse points four legs to the sky and rolls in the red clover:
the roan horse has a rusty jag of hair between the ears hanging to a
white star between the eyes.
.....
In Burlington long ago
And later again in Ashtabula
I said to myself:
I wonder how far Ophelia went with Hamlet.
What else was there Shakespeare never told?
There must have been something.
If I go bugs I want to do it like Ophelia.
There was class to the way she went out of her head.
.....
Does a famous poet eat watermelon?
Excuse me, ask me something easy.
I have seen farmhands with their faces in fried catfish on a Monday
morning.

And the Japanese, two-legged like us,
The Japanese bring slices of watermelon into pictures.
The black seeds make oval polka dots on the pink meat.

Why do I always think of niggers and buck-and-wing dancing whenever I
see watermelon?

Summer mornings on the docks I walk among bushel peach baskets piled
ten feet high.
Summer mornings I smell new wood and the river wind along with
peaches.
I listen to the steamboat whistle hong-honging, hong-honging across
the town.
And once I saw a teameo straddling a street with a hayrack load of
melons.
.....
Niggers play banjos because they want to.
The explanation is easy.

It is the same as why people pay fifty cents for tickets to a
policemen's masquerade ball or a grocers-and-butchers' picnic with a
fat man's foot race.
It is the same as why boys buy a nickel's worth of peanuts and eat
them and then buy another nickel's worth.
Newsboys shooting craps in a back alley have a fugitive understanding
of the scientific principle involved.
The jockey in a yellow satin shirt and scarlet boots, riding a sorrel
pony at the county fair, has a grasp of the theory.
It is the same as why boys go running lickety-split
away from a school-room geography lesson
in April when the crawfishes come out
and the young frogs are calling
and the pussywillows and the cat-tails
know something about geography themselves.
.....
I ask you for white blossoms.
I offer you memories and people.
I offer you a fire zigzag over the green and marching vines.
I bring a concertina after supper under the home-like apple trees.
I make up songs about things to look at:
potato blossoms in summer night mist filling the garden with white
spots;
a cavalryman's yellow silk handkerchief stuck in a flannel pocket
over the left side of the shirt, over the
ventricles of blood, over
the pumps of the heart.

Bring a concertina after sunset under the apple trees.
Let romance stutter to the western stars, "Excuse ... me..."






Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!


Other Poems of Interest...
Home: PoetryExplorer.net