Famous Chicago Poems by Famous Poets

 For 
 Carl Solomon 


 I 

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by 
 madness, starving hysterical naked, 
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn...Read More

 1
AS I sat alone, by blue Ontario’s shore, 
As I mused of these mighty days, and of peace return’d, and the dead that return no
 more, 
A Phantom, gigantic,...Read More

 SPLENDOR of ended day, floating and filling me! 
Hour prophetic—hour resuming the past! 
Inflating my throat—you, divine average! 
You, Earth and Life, till the last ray gleams, I sing....Read More

 to Robert Hass and in memory of Elliot Gilbert


Slow dulcimer, gavotte and bow, in autumn,
Bashõ and his friends go out to view the moon;
In summer, gasoline rainbow in the...Read More

 When a man starts out with nothing,
 When a man starts out with his hands
 Empty, but clean,
 When a man starts to build a world,
He starts first with...Read More

 America I've given you all and now I'm nothing. 
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 
 17, 1956. 
I can't stand my own mind. 
America when will we...Read More

 After seeing at Boston the statue of Robert Gould Shaw, killed while storming Fort Wagner, July 18, 1863, at the head of the first enlisted negro regiment, the Fifty-fourth...Read More

 1
STARTING from fish-shape Paumanok, where I was born, 
Well-begotten, and rais’d by a perfect mother; 
After roaming many lands—lover of populous pavements; 
Dweller in Mannahatta, my city—or on southern...Read More

 In flat America, in Chicago, 
Graceland cemetery on the German North Side. 
Forty feet of Corinthian candle 
celebrate Pullman embedded 
lonely raisin in a cake of concrete. 
The Potter...Read More

 WORSEWICK







Worsewick Hot Springs was nothing fancy. Somebody put some

boards across the creek. That was it.

 The boards dammed up the creek enough to form a huge

bathtub there, and the...Read More

 All afternoon my father drove the country roads
between Detroit and Lansing. What he was looking for
I never learned, no doubt because he never knew himself,
though he would grab any...Read More

 (or Blues for a Mississippi Black Boy)

I was born in Mississippi;
I walked barefooted thru the mud.
Born black in Mississippi,
Walked barefooted thru the mud.
But, when I reached the age of...Read More

 THE SINS of Kalamazoo are neither scarlet nor crimson.

The sins of Kalamazoo are a convict gray, a dishwater drab.

And the people who sin the sins of Kalamazoo are neither...Read More

Reason says, “I will beguile him with the tongue;”
Love says, “Be silent. I will beguile him with the soul.”
The soul says to the heart,...Read More

 THEY shall arise in the States, 
They shall report Nature, laws, physiology, and happiness; 
They shall illustrate Democracy and the kosmos; 
They shall be alimentive, amative, perceptive; 
They shall...Read More

 THE DREAM

This has nothing to do with war 
or the end of the world. She 
dreams there are gray starlings 
on the winter lawn and the buds 
of next...Read More

 In the mid-city, under an oiled sky,
I lay in a garden of such dusky green
It seemed the dregs of the imagination.
Hedged round by elegant spears of iron fence
My face...Read More

 I became a criminal when I fell in love.
Before that I was a waitress.

I didn't want to go to Chicago with you.
I wanted to marry you, I wanted
Your wife...Read More

 I DRANK musty ale at the Illinois Athletic Club with
the millionaire manufacturer of Green River butter
one night
And his face had the shining light of an old-time Quaker,
he spoke of...Read More

 St. John of the Cross wore dark glasses
As he passed me on the street.
St. Theresa of Avila, beautiful and grave,
Turned her back on me.

"Soulmate," they hissed. "It's high time."

I...Read More

 I hear a whistling
Through the water.
Little Emmett
Won't be still.
He keeps floating
Round the darkness,
Edging through
The silent chill.
Tell me, please,
That bedtime story
Of the fairy
River Boy
Who swims forever,
Deep in treasures,
Necklaced in
A coral...Read More

 I asked the old Negro, "What is that bird that sings so well?" He answered: "That is the Rachel-Jane." "Hasn't it another name, lark, or thrush, or the like?"...Read More

 Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders;

They tell me you are wicked and I...Read More

 In Lake Forest, a suburb of Chicago,
a woman sits at her desk to write
me a letter. She holds a photograph
of me up to the light, one taken
17 years ago...Read More

 Tra-la-la-la-la-la-laire—nil nisi divinum stabile est; caetera fumus—the gondola
stopped, the old palace was there, how charming its grey and pink—goats and
monkeys, with such hair too!—so the countess passed on until...Read More