Grass
by Carl Sandburg
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
I am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?
I am the grass.
Let me work.
This is the third post in my Cemetery Series, poems I left at a peaceful cemetery in northern Michigan a few weeks ago. I’m getting around to them one by one even though I placed all of them on graves on the same day.
I don’t even know if I like this poem. A battle for a noble cause (Gettysburg) is side-by-side ones that seem pointless now (Ypres, Verdun, et al), and I left it on the grave of a very young man who died for the great cause of the last century, the fight against tyranny and hate. But I guess that’s the point. The grass don’t care who’s right and who’s wrong.
Sandburg was surely thinking of the bodies of men. I read this and I’m thinking of the body of a beautiful young woman, Heather Heyer, who was fighting evil with peaceful protest instead of a sword, a gun, a grenade.
The poem sounds like a protest folk song from the sixties. You can just hear Joan Baez or Judy Collins singing
What place is this?
Where are we now?
In fact poet Carl Sandburg was also a folk musician. He used to accompany his poem readings with a guitar, and he also sang. You can listen here to one here.
Sandburg (1878-1967) goes in an out of fashion, but he’s a quintessentially American poet with a quintessentially American life. Born in Illinois, his parents were Swedish immigrants who worked hard to provide for their seven children. His father was a blacksmith’s helper for a railroad, his mother cleaned rooms at a hotel.
Sandburg left school after eighth grade and started working at age 13. His resume reads like a Walt Whitman poem: shoe shiner, dishwasher, hobo, milk truck driver, porter, house painter, soldier, brick layer, farm laborer, hotel servant, coal heaver. He attended college but never graduated. His long public career included work as a journalist, film reviewer, poet, editor, writer of children’s stories, and most famously, biographer of Abraham Lincoln.
He was a favorite of Marily Monroe (a fascinating story), spoke before both houses of Congress, and appeared on What’s My Line? Take a few minutes to watch him on that show—he’s so charming, disguising his deep voice as a child’s to fool the panelists. (Also charming: how literate and educated the celebrity panelists are, how elegant and respectful. Sigh.) At the end of the clip there’s a touching tribute to Sandburg’s efforts to build a foundation in honor of journalists who died during World War II.
In light of the new proposed immigration standards, it’s worth quoting Sandburg’s reflections on one of the themes of his life:
“My father couldn’t sign his name,” wrote Sandburg; “[he] made his ‘mark’ on the CB&Q payroll sheet. My mother was able to read the Scriptures in her native language, but she could not write, and I wrote of Abraham Lincoln whose own mother could not read or write! I guess that somewhere along in this you’ll find a story of America.”
William DeWitt Snodgrass (1926-2009) was born in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. His father was an accountant, his mother a homemaker with a domineering personality who Snodgrass later blamed, rightly or wrongly, for the death of his sister from an asthma attack.
Theodore Roethke (1908- 1963) was born in Saginaw, Michigan, the son of German immigrants. His father ran a floral business, and Roethke spent hours and hours in the greenhouses, which he would later call “my symbol for the whole of life, a womb, a heaven-on-earth.” When he was fourteen, his father died of cancer and his uncle committed suicide.
Nick Flynn was born in Massachusetts in 1960. He was raised by a single mother who committed suicide when he was a young adult. His father was an alcoholic who fancied himself a writer and went to prison for writing forged checks. While in prison, his father wrote him letters full of advice, but Flynn never wrote back out of respect for his mother. After high school, Flynn became an electrician.
