How should the wind songs of a windy city go?
Singing in a high wind the dirty chatter gets blown
away on the wind — the clean shovel,
the clean pickax,
lasts.
It is easy for a child to get breakfast and pack off
to school with a pair of roller skates,
buns for lunch, and a geography.
Riding through a tunnel under a river running backward,
to school to listen...how the Pottawatomies...
and the Blackhawks...ran on moccasins...
between Kaskaskia, Peoria, Kankakee, and Chicago.
It is easy to sit listening to a boy babbling
of the Pottawatomie moccasins in Illinois,
how now the roofs and smokestacks cover miles
where the deerfoot left its writing
and the foxpaw put its initials
in the snow...for the early moccasins...to read.
It is easy for the respectable taxpayers to sit in the
streetcars and read the papers, faces of burglars,
the prison escapes, the hunger strikes, the cost of
living, the price of dying, the shop gate battles of
strikers and strikebreakers, the strikers killing
scabs and the police killing strikers — the strongest,
the strongest, always the strongest.
It is easy to listen to the haberdasher customers hand each other their
easy chatter — it is easy to die
alive — to register a living thumbprint and be dead
from the neck up.
And there are sidewalks polished with the footfalls of
undertakers' stiffs, greased mannikins, wearing up-to-
the-minute sox, lifting heels across doorsills,
shoving their faces ahead of them — dead from the
neck up — proud of their sox — their sox are the last
word — dead from the neck up — it is easy.
This is part 2 of a long poem.
Poetry Atlas has many poems about Chicago, including many by Sandburg.
This poem comes from the collection, Slabs of the Sunburnt West.