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Home  »  Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  »  Carl Sandburg

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

The Next Child Waits

Carl Sandburg

From “Redhaw Winds”

I KNOW the city waits … the next child waits … there is a great singing Mother.

Our earth of a turning ball—who set it swinging? A great Nobody? Who put the People down on the wire-grass wilderness? A great Nobody?

I have listened to the tides of the sea trying to spell the word. I have walked under tall trees and heard winter winds trying to write the high sign of it. I have felt the magnet pull of it under the shoes of my feet in the dirt of a prairie road.

I know the city waits … the next child waits … there is a great singing Mother.