CARL SANDBURG ON THE LIGHTS OF SING SING
Editor's note: To mark National Poetry Month, we reprint Carl Sandburg's poem, "Letter to Paula from a Hill Near Croton."
Sandburg, a Pulitzer Prize winning poet and biographer, died in 1967. Paula was his wife. The poem was written after Sandburg visited Croton and his friend, John Reed, the journalist, socialist activist and author of "Ten Days That Shook The World" about the Russian Revolution. Reed is the only American buried in the Kremlin wall, but may be better remembered from the movie "Reds" where he was portrayed by Warren Beatty.
And check out Reed's sense of geography. West Point directly across the river? Poetic license? (And thanks to Cornelia Cotton, one of Croton's leading artists, for bringing the poem to our attention) For more poetry, go to www.poets.org
LETTER TO PAULA FROM A HILL NEAR CROTON
Paula:
I pick this for you
On a hill near Croton.
The evening lights of Sing Sing
Flicker a brass bar…
…a living gold wire of light…
A flickering strip of hot gold…
Down among rock-walled hills of the Hudson.
"There" says John Reed and his right forefinger,
"is the point of land where Andre met Benedict Arnold"
"and" says the shifting forefinger
"straight across the river is West Point."
(And an Illinois boy's head flutters:
Grant, Lee, Gettysburg, Zachary Taylor, Chapultepec,
The Rio Grande, Pershing, Toul, Cantigny:
A boy's head flutters with names.)
"And that is Haverstraw":
Another gold wire of molten light
Laid quivering on a weave of shadows,
Hill rock and night river nets of dusk.
A great moon pours silver here
where the feet of Isadora Duncan
dreamt new dances…
And the Sing Sing, Haverstraw wires of molten light
Quiver at the night's questions.