Another Sandburg poem.

I bought the complete collected works of Carl Sandburg yesterday at a secondhand bookstore in Ottawa – and am sufficiently enamoured of this poem to post it here. It’s a great one for reading outloud. I’m in love with Sandburg at the moment.

Hammers Pounding

Grant had a sledgehammer pounding and pounding and Lee had a sledgehammer pounding and pounding
And the two hammers gnashed their ends against each other and broke holes and splintered and withered
And nobody knew how the war would end and everybody prayed God his hammer would last longer than the other hammer
Because the whole war hung on the big guess of who had the hardest hammer
And in the end one side one the war because it had a harder hammer than the other side
Give us a hard enough hammer, a long enough hammer and we will break any nation
Crush any star you name or smash the sun and the moon into flinders.

Carl Sandburg, 1915