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Home  »  Smoke and Steel  »  9. Two Items

Carl Sandburg (1878–1967). Smoke and Steel. 1922.

VII. Passports

9. Two Items

STRONG rocks hold up the riksdag bridge … always strong river waters shoving their shoulders against them …

In the riksdag to-night three hundred men are talking to each other about more potatoes and bread for the Swedish people to eat this winter.

In a boat among calm waters next to the running waters a fisherman sits in the dark and I, leaning at a parapet, see him lift a net and let it down … he waits … the waters run … the riksdag talks … he lifts the net and lets it down …

Stars lost in the sky ten days of drizzle spread over the sky saying yes-yes.

Every afternoon at four o’clock fifteen apple women who have sold their apples in Christiania meet at a coffee house and gab.

Every morning at nine o’clock a girl wipes the windows of a hotel across the street from the post-office in Stockholm.

I have pledged them when I go to California next summer and see the orange groves splattered with yellow balls

I shall remember other people half way round the world.