Sandburg's "They have yarns..."
This is the America I remember; the America of big cities and strange frontier and tall ships and taller buildings and clever farmers and Yankee ingenuity; the America where everything is new and everything is big and you can keep your old folk heroes because we have new folk heroes here. This is an America I could be proud of.
They Have Yarns by Carl Sandburg
"They have yarns
Of a skyscraper so tall they had to put hinges
On the two top stories so to let the moon go by,
Of one corn crop in Missouri when the roots
Went so deep and drew off so much water
The Mississippi riverbed that year was dry,
Of pancakes so thin they had only one side,
Of 'a fog so thick we shingled the barn and six feet out on the fog,'
Of Pecos Pete straddling a cyclone in Texas and riding it to the west
coast where 'it rained out under him,'
Of the man who drove a swarm of bees across the Rocky Mountains and
the Desert 'and didn’t lose a bee,'
Of a mountain railroad curve where the engineer in his cab can touch
the caboose and spit in the conductor’s eye..."
They Have Yarns by Carl Sandburg
"They have yarns
Of a skyscraper so tall they had to put hinges
On the two top stories so to let the moon go by,
Of one corn crop in Missouri when the roots
Went so deep and drew off so much water
The Mississippi riverbed that year was dry,
Of pancakes so thin they had only one side,
Of 'a fog so thick we shingled the barn and six feet out on the fog,'
Of Pecos Pete straddling a cyclone in Texas and riding it to the west
coast where 'it rained out under him,'
Of the man who drove a swarm of bees across the Rocky Mountains and
the Desert 'and didn’t lose a bee,'
Of a mountain railroad curve where the engineer in his cab can touch
the caboose and spit in the conductor’s eye..."