Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, ALWAYS THE MOB, by CARL SANDBURG


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

ALWAYS THE MOB, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: Jesus emptied the devils of one man into forty hogs
Last Line: In the night of our tears.


JESUS emptied the devils of one man into forty hogs and the hogs took
the edge of a high rock and dropped off and down into the sea: a mob.

The sheep on the hills of Australia, blundering fourfooted in the
sunset mist to the dark, they go one way, they hunt one sleep, they
find one pocket of grass for all.

Karnak? Pyramids? Sphinx paws tall as a coolie? Tombs kept for kings
and sacred cows? A mob.

Young roast pigs and naked dancing girls of Belshazzar, the room where
a thousand sat guzzling when a hand wrote: Mene, mene, tekel,
upharsin? A mob.

The honeycomb of green that won the sun as the Hanging Gardens of
Nineveh, flew to its shape at the hands of a mob that followed the
fingers of Nebuchadnezzar: a mob of one hand and one plan.

Stones of a circle of hills at Athens, staircases of a mountain in
Peru, scattered clans of marble dragons in China: each a mob on the
rim of a sunrise: hammers and wagons have them now.

Locks and gates of Panama? The Union Pacific crossing deserts and
tunneling mountains? The Woolworth on land and the Titanic at sea?
Lighthouses blinking a coast line from Labrador to Key West? Pigiron
bars piled on a barge whistling in a fog off Sheboygan? A mob: hammers
and wagons have them to-morrow.

The mob? A typhoon tearing loose an island from thousand-year moorings
and bastions, shooting a volcanic ash with a fire tongue that licks up
cities and peoples. Layers of worms eating rocks and forming loam and
valley floors for potatoes, wheat, watermelons.

The mob? A jag of lightning, a geyser, a gravel mass loosening...

The mob ... kills or builds ... the mob is Attila or Ghengis Khan, the
mob is Napoleon, Lincoln.

I am born in the mob -- I die in the mob -- the same goes
for you -- I don't
care who you are.

I cross the sheets of fire in No Man's land for you, my brother -- I
slip a steel tooth into your throat, you my brother -- I
die for you and
I kill you -- It is a twisted and gnarled thing, a crimson wool:
One more arch of stars,
In the night of our mist,
In the night of our tears.






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