Reading Sandburg at the Beach

by Alinda Dickinson Wasner


Suddenly he looks so young

Now that I’m almost as old 

as he was

when he was in vogue.


Perhaps it’s better this way.

Would I have cared so much

About unions when I was

In tenth grade

Or read any but the Chicago poems?


Those and the cornhuskers

And the smoke and steel

Are the ones that

Always get anthologized,

That teachers have to teach.


For god’s sake he was my

Grandparents’ contemporary

And I doubt they read him

Or discussed him

Or realized he was writing about them

For they were out there husking corn,

Riding the rails in search of work

Not wanting much to have

Anything to do with cities, especially

The windy one

But what choice did they have?


When Uncle Lamereaux

Wrote home about having to stand

In all that blood day after day

In the slaughterhouse, I doubt he

Took out his volume of Sandburg

For bedtime reading,


Or that Aunt Laura, strong woman

In her own right, ever had a chance

To read his works by lamplight

To her dying patients


We may never know.


But they could have identified

The bugs in the lily and the magnolia

Would have recognized themselves

In the splinters of the first frost

And in the fiery heat of the big furnace


And they would have had him home

For Sunday dinner, to sit on the porch

And ask him questions over pie

Had they known about him.

Had they heard his name, these people, yes.