Literary Hook: Celebrating Carl Sandburg’s birthday
By Christine Swanberg
Author and Poet
Jan. 6 is Carl Sandburg’s birthday. This beloved Illinois poet has touched many of us with his poems, particularly those set in Chicago.
In honor of Sandburg’s birthday, I dug out a poem I wrote nearly 20 years ago. It celebrates Carl Sandburg as well as Chicago.
The poem was first published in Strong Coffee, a Chicago newsprint celebrating the arts of Chicago, similar to our very own Rock River Times. The poem was also published in The Tenderness of Memory, a collection produced by Plain View Press in 1995. My gratitude to those publishers.
Ten Minutes on Michigan Avenue
A full moon loops
around Buckingham Fountain.
Horns muffle, evaporate
into Lake Michigan, holding
cement monoliths so bold
I wonder how a woman
could love this city.
The brusque wind has killed geraniums
potted in the sidewalk café’s white boxes.
Sipping cappuccino, hot froth of milk,
surprising January splash of sun:Why
does this city comfort me,
small woman with a past
a hundred miles away?
Here I am the golden phoenix
of my dreams, drinking elixir
from a bone-white cup,
watching another woman
wearing a blue beret,
her face large, lunar and pale,
ruby lipstick startling as the siren
that slides from my periphery.
Anything can happen here:
Matisse to murder.
Sandburg’s thumbprint
or a lighthouse blinking
under moonlight in the fog.
From the Jan. 6-12, 2010 issue
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