Killers
Carl Sandburg 1878 (Galesburg) – 1967 (Flat Rock)
I am singing to you
Soft as a man with a dead child speaks;
Hard as a man in handcuffs,
Held where he cannot move:
Under the sun
Are sixteen million men,
Chosen for shining teeth,
Sharp eyes, hard legs,
And a running of young warm blood in their wrists.
And a red juice runs on the green grass;
And a red juice soaks the dark soil.
And the sixteen million are killing. . . and killing
and killing.
I never forget them day or night:
They beat on my head for memory of them;
They pound on my heart and I cry back to them,
To their homes and women, dreams and games.
I wake in the night and smell the trenches,
And hear the low stir of sleepers in lines--
Sixteen million sleepers and pickets in the dark:
Some of them long sleepers for always,
Some of them tumbling to sleep to-morrow for always,
Fixed in the drag of the world's heartbreak,
Eating and drinking, toiling. . . on a long job of
killing.
Sixteen million men.
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on April 16, 2023
- 53 sec read
- 97 Views
Quick analysis:
Scheme | XXXX XAXXX XXBB XCCX XXXDDXXBA |
---|---|
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 903 |
Words | 177 |
Stanzas | 5 |
Stanza Lengths | 4, 5, 4, 4, 9 |
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"Killers" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 20 Sep. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/4699/killers>.
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