They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted

women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.

And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the

gunman kill and go free to kill again.

And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and

children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.

And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:

Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.

10

Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;

All selections from Chicago Poems, by Carl Sandburg. Copyright, 1916, Henry Holt and Company.

Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,

Bareheaded,

Shoveling,

Wrecking,

Planning,

Building, breaking, rebuilding,

15

20

Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the
heart of the people,
Laughing!

Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.

Now the stone house on the lake front is finished and the workmen are beginning

the fence.

The palings are made of iron bars with steel points that can stab the life out of any man that falls on them.

As a fence, it is a masterpiece, and will shut off the rabble and all vagabonds and hungry men and all wandering children looking for a place to play. Passing through the bars and over the steel points will go nothing except Death and the Rain and To-morrow.

MAMIE

Mamie beat her head against the bars of a little Indiana town and dreamed of romance and big things off somewhere the way the railroad trains all ran.

She could see the smoke of the engines get lost down where the streaks of steel flashed in the sun, and when the newspapers came in on the morning mail she knew there was a big Chicago far off, where all the trains ran. She got tired of the barber shop boys and the postoffice chatter and the church gossip and the old pieces the band played on the Fourth of July and Decoration Day

And sobbed at her fate and beat her head against the bars and was going to kill herself

When the thought came to her that if she was going to die she might as well die struggling for a clutch of romance among the streets of Chicago. 5 She has a job now at six dollars a week in the basement of the Boston Store And even now she beats her head against the bars in the same old way and wonders if there is a bigger place the railroads run to from Chicago where maybe there is

I have been watching the war map slammed up for advertising in front of the newspaper office.

Buttons-red and yellow buttons-blue and black buttons-are shoved back and forth across the map.

A laughing young man, sunny with freckles,

Climbs a ladder, yells a joke to somebody in the crowd,

And then fixes a yellow button one inch west

And follows the yellow button with a black button one inch west.

(Ten thousand men and boys twist on their bodies in a red soak along a river edge,

Gasping of wounds, calling for water, some rattling death in their throats.) Who would guess what it cost to move two buttons one inch on the war map here in front of the newspaper office where the freckle-faced young man is laughing to us?