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Carl Sandburg - SkyscraperCarl Sandburg - Skyscraper
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By day the skyscraper looms in the smoke and sun and     has a soul. Prairie and valley, streets of the city, pour people into     it and they mingle among its twenty floors and are     poured out again back to the streets, prairies and     valleys. It is the men and women, boys and girls so poured in and     out all day that give the building a soul of dreams     and thoughts and memories. (Dumped in the sea or fixed in a desert, who would care     for the building or speak its name or ask a policeman     the way to it?) Elevators slide on their cables and tubes catch letters and     parcels and iron pipes carry gas and water in and     sewage out. Wires climb with secrets, carry light and carry words,     and tell terrors and profits and loves—curses of men     grappling plans of business and questions of women     in plots of love. Hour by hour the caissons reach down to the rock of the     earth and hold the building to a turning planet. Hour by hour the girders play as ribs and reach out and     hold together the stone walls and floors. Hour by hour the hand of the mason and the stuff of the     mortar clinch the pieces and parts to the shape an     architect voted. Hour by hour the sun and the rain, the air and the rust,     and the press of time running into centuries, play     on the building inside and out and use it. Men who sunk the pilings and mixed the mortar are laid     in graves where the wind whistles a wild song     without words And so are men who strung the wires and fixed the pipes     and tubes and those who saw it rise floor by floor. Souls of them all are here, even the hod carrier begging     at back doors hundreds of miles away and the brick-     layer who went to state`s prison for shooting another     man while drunk. (One man fell from a girder and broke his neck at the     end of a straight plunge—he is here—his soul has     gone into the stones of the building.) On the office doors from tier to tier—hundreds of names     and each name standing for a face written across     with a dead child, a passionate lover, a driving     ambition for a million dollar business or a lobster`s     ease of life. Behind the signs on the doors they work and the walls     tell nothing from room to room. Ten-dollar-a-week stenographers take letters from     corporation officers, lawyers, efficiency engineers,     and tons of letters go bundled from the building to all     ends of the earth. Smiles and tears of each office girl go into the soul of     the building just the same as the master-men who     rule the building. Hands of clocks turn to noon hours and each floor     empties its men and women who go away and eat     and come back to work. Toward the end of the afternoon all work slackens and     all jobs go slower as the people feel day closing on     them. One by one the floors are emptied. . . The uniformed     elevator men are gone. Pails clang. . . Scrubbers     work, talking in foreign tongues. Broom and water     and mop clean from the floors human dust and spit,     and machine grime of the day. Spelled in electric fire on the roof are words telling     miles of houses and people where to buy a thing for     money. The sign speaks till midnight. Darkness on the hallways. Voices echo. Silence     holds. . . Watchmen walk slow from floor to floor     and try the doors. Revolvers bulge from their hip     pockets. . . Steel safes stand in corners. Money     is stacked in them. A young watchman leans at a window and sees the lights     of barges butting their way across a harbor, nets of     red and white lanterns in a railroad yard, and a span     of glooms splashed with lines of white and blurs of     crosses and clusters over the sleeping city. By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars     and has a soul.
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