Back to Index

Graceland

by Carl Sandburg, 1916

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.)

Published in Chicago Poems
Tags:

Any corrections or public domain poems I should have here? Email me at poems (at) this domain.