Our Readers Speak
This month: Jackie Pray
Sandburg is my favorite poet. Tom and I read his poem “Honey and Salt” at our wedding.
And when we return to Hemlock Hall at Blue Mt. Lake every year for our anniversary,
we re-read it. It’s a long poem but my favorite passages are:
All three – along with moonlight, roses, groceries,
givings and forgivings, gettings and forgettings,
keepsakes and room rent,
pearls of memory along with ham and eggs.
…How long does love last?
As long as glass bubbles handled with care
or two hot-house orchids in a blizzard….
You must also know that Sandburg was a reporter in Chicago . I used to give this piece from the Chicago poems to my J-1 classes.
Personality
Musings of a Police Reporter in the Identification Bureau
You have loved forty women, but you have only one thumb.
You have led a hundred secret lives, but you mark only one thumb.
You go round the world and fight in a thousand wars and win all the
world’s honors, but when you come back home the print of the one
thumb your mother gave you is the same print of thumb you had
in the old home when your mother kissed you and said good-by.
Out of the whirling womb of time come millions of men and their feet
crowd the earth and they cut one another’s throats for room to stand
and among them all are not two thumbs alike.
Somewhere is a Great God of Thumbs who can tell the inside story of this.