Veteran

• Artist: Treesah Quiche
• Description: I am incorrigibly a Carl Sandburg fangirl. This poem, while being an original of mine, owes a lot to the stylistic and ideological quirks of my favorite poet. This poem is only ten lines; the first six are just ridiculously long, in typical Sandburg fashion. I don't have as much formatting freedom in BBCode as I do in my word processor.
• Date: 01/18/2009
• Tags: sandburg chicago race riot 1920s

Somewhere over there he fought the fritzes for the cause and wore a stiff collared jacket and marched past crowds of women and children who cheered the brass beating against his chest with each booted stomp.
After he came home he tilled a field that wasn’t his and lived in a home that wasn’t his and cowered at night as the stamp of hoof beats mounted the hills around him
And as he blended into the dark he dreamed of houses lit up for dancing and gleaming roasts and seersucker suits and he thought if maybe somewhere past the fields and hills there was a place big enough and bright enough to be alive in.
So he traded the hills for a dark narrow room in Chicago and took a job packing butchered hogs and went dancing every night
But the cause was drumming out its call again and it was one he couldn’t ignore so he joined his brothers and sisters and skirmished against the jabs from faces fire red and the hoof beats of his memory for small victories to clutch on to
And one day when he fell underfoot in the bawling mob he imagined he could feel each sole of brother and sister and other that he heard treading by and he wondered at
tab this new war
tab and all the soldiers
tab and how this could
tab possibly end well.