Graceland

Carl Sandburg

TOMB of a millionaire,   
 A multi-millionaire, ladies and gentlemen,   
 Place of the dead where they spend every year   
 The usury of twenty-five thousand dollars   
 For upkeep and flowers       
 To keep fresh the memory of the dead.   
 The merchant prince gone to dust   
 Commanded in his written will   
 Over the signed name of his last testament   
 Twenty-five thousand dollars be set aside         
 For roses, lilacs, hydrangeas, tulips,   
 For perfume and color, sweetness of remembrance   
 Around his last long home.   
 
(A hundred cash girls want nickels to go to the movies to-night.
In the back stalls of a hundred saloons, women are at tables     
Drinking with men or waiting for men jingling loose silver dollars in their pockets.   
In a hundred furnished rooms is a girl who sells silk or dress goods or leather stuff for six dollars a week wages   
And when she pulls on her stockings in the morning she is reckless about God and the newspapers and the police, the talk of her home town or the name people call her.)