Carl Sandburg, 1878 - 1967

READY TO KILL

TEN minutes now I have been looking at this.
I have gone by here before and wondered about it.
This is a bronze memorial of a famous general
Riding horseback with a flag and a sword and a revolver
on him.
I want to smash the whole thing into a pile of junk to be
hauled away to the scrap yard.
I put it straight to you,
After the farmer, the miner, the shop man, the factory
hand, the fireman and the teamster,
Have all been remembered with bronze memorials,
Shaping them on the job of getting all of us
Something to eat and something to wear,
When they stack a few silhouettes
Against the sky
Here in the park,
And show the real huskies that are doing the work of
the world, and feeding people instead of butchering them,
Then maybe I will stand here
And look easy at this general of the army holding a flag
in the air,
And riding like hell on horseback
Ready to kill anybody that gets in his way,
Ready to run the red blood and slush the bowels of men
all over the sweet new grass of the prairie

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Journalist, poet, novelist, and biographer Carl Sandburg was born in Galesburg, Illinois (1878). Although he wanted to be a writer from the age of six, Sandburg quit school following his graduation from the eighth grade in 1891 and spent a decade working at a variety of jobs. He delivered milk, harvested ice, laid bricks, threshed wheat in Kansas, and shined shoes in Galesburg's Union Hotel before traveling as a hobo in 1897. He moved to Chicago and worked for several years as a reporter, covering mostly labor issues. In 1914, he published several poems in Poetry magazine. Two years later, his book Chicago Poems was published and brought him national and international acclaim. He wrote two more volumes, Cornhuskers (1918) and Smoke and Steel (1920). He also collected folk songs, and in 1927 he brought together nearly 300 songs and ballads in a collection called The American Songbag.
In 1922, Sandburg published Rootabaga Stories, a book of fanciful children's tales. That prompted Sandburg's publisher to suggest a biography of Abraham Lincoln for children. Sandburg researched and wrote for three years, producing not a children's book, but a two-volume biography for adults. His Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years (1926) was his first financial success. He moved to a new home and devoted the next several years to completing four additional volumes, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, for which he won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize.