dual personalities

Many things I might have said today.
And I kept my mouth shut.
So many times I was asked
To come and say the same things
Everybody was saying, no end
To the yes-yes, yes-yes,
me-too, me-too.

The aprons of silence covered me.
A wire and hatch held my tongue.
I spit nails into an abyss and listened.
I shut off the gable of Jones, Johnson, Smith,
All whose names take pages in the city directory.

I fixed up a padded cell and lugged it around.
I locked myself in and nobody knew it.
Only the keeper and the kept in the hoosegow
Knew it–on the streets, in the post office,
On the cars, into the railroad station
Where the caller was calling, “All a-board,
All a-board for . . . Blaa-blaa . . . Blaa-blaa,
Blaa-blaa . . . and all points northwest . . .all a-board.”
Here I took along my own hoosegow
And did business with my own thoughts.
Do you see? It must be the aprons of silence.

–Carl Sandburg

Today is Carl Sandburg’s birthday. He lived from 1878 to 1967 and during his lifetime he was held in high regard, winning three Pulitzer Prizes for poetry and biography. When he died President Lyndon Johnson said, “Carl Sandburg was more than the voice of America, more than the poet of its strength and genius. He was America.” Seems like a bit of an overstatement.

Sandburg understood some things though. He said: “When a nation goes down or a society perishes, one condition may always be found–They forgot where they came from.”

I liked this remembrance of Sandburg by the son of the artist William A. Smith who painted his portrait which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.