Best Chicago Poems

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

(or Blues for a Mississippi Black Boy)

I was born in Mississippi;
I walked barefooted thru the mud.
...

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

There's a breathless hush on the freeway tonight
Beyond the ledges of concrete
restaurants fall into dreams
with candlelight couples
...

Now a friend of mine, way back in Chicago
You know, he finally made his pile.
Well he got himself a mansion on Butler and Sheff
...

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,
...

I like Canadians.
They are so unlike Americans.
They go home at night.
Their cigarettes don't smell bad.
...

In places like
Selma, Alabama,
Kids say,
In places like
...

I saluted a nobody.
I saw him in a looking-glass.
He smiled--so did I.
He crumpled the skin on his forehead, frowning--so did I.
...

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
...

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.
...

OF him I love day and night, I dream'd I heard he was dead;
And I dream'd I went where they had buried him I love--but he was not
in that place;
...

O chansons foregoing
You were a seven days' wonder.
When you came out in the magazines
You created considerable stir in Chicago,
...

SPLENDOR of ended day, floating and filling me!
Hour prophetic--hour resuming the past!
Inflating my throat--you, divine average!
...

1

Many animals that our fathers killed in America
Had quick eyes.
...

April doesnt hurt here
Like it does in New England
The ground
Vast and brown
...

Oh the changing of the seasons it's a pretty thing to see
And though I find this balmy weather pleasin'
...

This is for the kids who die,
Black and white,
For kids will die certainly.
The old and rich will live on awhile,
As always,
...

Over and over they used to ask me,
While buying the wine or the beer,
In Peoria first, and later in Chicago,
Denver, Frisco, New York, wherever I lived,
...

In flat America, in Chicago,
Graceland cemetery on the German North Side.
Forty feet of Corinthian candle
celebrate Pullman embedded
...

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;
...

RISE, O days, from your fathomless deeps, till you loftier, fiercer
sweep!
Long for my soul, hungering gymnastic, I devour'd what the earth gave
...

In presenting this delicate, dainty morsel to the imagination of the people, I believed that it could be realized. I viewed the machine that turned and raised the mamoth cheese, and saw the powerful machine invented by James Ireland at the West Oxford companies factory to turn the great and fine cheese he was making there. This company with but little assistance could produce a ten ton cheese.


Who hath prophetic vision sees
...

THEY shall arise in the States,
They shall report Nature, laws, physiology, and happiness;
They shall illustrate Democracy and the kosmos;
...

MAMIE beat her head against the bars of a little Indiana
town and dreamed of romance and big things off
somewhere the way the railroad trains all ran.
...

I. CHICKENS

I am The Great White Way of the city:
When you ask what is my desire, I answer:
...

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,
...

If the excursion train to Peoria
Had just been wrecked, I might have escaped with my life --
Certainly I should have escaped this place.
But as it was burned as well, they mistook me
...

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.
...

In Chicago, it is snowing softly
and a man has just done his wash for the week.
He steps into the twilight of early evening,
carrying a wrinkled shopping bag
...

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?" "No. Jus' Rachel-Jane."


I. IN WHICH A RACING AUTO COMES FROM THE EAST
...

Whenas ye plaisaunt Aperille shoures have washed and purged awaye
Ye poysons and ye rheums of earth to make a merrie May,
Ye shraddy boscage of ye woods ben full of birds that syng
Right merrilie a madrigal unto ye waking spring,
...

THE DREAM

This has nothing to do with war
or the end of the world. She
...

Beatiest of beats let me address you
as you America. Let me bless you
charleychaplin poet that you are
like Ferlinghetti spreadeagled in air
...

When the Lieutenant of the Guardia de Asalto
heard the automatic go off, he turned
and took the second shot just above
the sternum, the third tore away
...

Well now friends you'll never guess it so I really must confess it
I just met the sweetest woman of my long dismal life.
...

Into the blue river hills
The red sun runners go
And the long sand changes
And to-day is a goner
...

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
...

When Reuben Pantier ran away and threw me
I went to Springfield. There I met a lush,
Whose father just deceased left him a fortune.
He married me when drunk. My life was wretched.
...

Chicago ran a fever of a hundred and one that groggy Sunday.
A reporter fried an egg on a sidewalk; the air looked shaky.
And a hundred thousand people were in the lake like shirts in
a laundry.
...

I won the prize essay at school
Here in the village,
And published a novel before I was twenty-five.
I went to the city for themes and to enrich my art;
...

Sunday night and the park policemen tell each other it
is dark as a stack of black cats on Lake Michigan.
A big picnic boat comes home to Chicago from the peach
farms of Saugatuck.
...

Once I lived in a village not far
from the thirty-eighth parallel
near Kaesong, in fact
...

'My age, my beast!' - Osip Mandelstam

On the lips a taste of tolling we are blind
The light drifts like dust over faces
...

Through sleet and fogs to the saline bogs
Where the herring fish meanders,
An army sped, and then, 't is said,
Swore terribly in Flanders:
...

Men said at vespers: 'All is well!'
In one wild night the city fell;
Fell shrines of prayer and marts of gain
Before the fiery hurricane.
...

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 unfamiliar side road
...

Jesse James was a lad who killed many a man.
He robbed the Glendale train.
He stole from the rich and he gave to the poor,
...

The last walls of shame fell,
And we rejoiced…
And we danced…
...

To-day, fair Thisbe, winsome girl!
Strays o'er the meads where daisies blow,
Or, ling'ring where the brooklets purl,
Laves in the cool, refreshing flow.
...

The press of the Spoon River Clarion was wrecked,
And I was tarred and feathered,
For publishing this on the day the Anarchists were hanged in Chicago:
"I saw a beautiful woman with bandaged eyes
...

As to democracy, fellow citizens,
Are you not prepared to admit
That I, who inherited riches and was to the manor born,
Was second to none in Spoon River
...

Like a painting by Velazquez
A woman stands
Alone in the frame
...

I
The coast-road was being straightened and repaired again,
A group of men labored at the steep curve
...

Now tidy your house,
dust especially your living room
and do not forget to name
all your children.
...

Yet like grandfather
I bathe before the village crow

the dry chlorine water
my only Ganges
...

CHICAGO sounds rough to the maker of verse;
One comfort we have--Cincinnati sounds worse;
...

The summer of nineteen eighteen
I read The Jungle and The
Research Magnificent. That fall
...

The Fisk Street turbine power station in Chicago

The invisible wheels go softly round and round—
Light is the tread of brazen-footed Power.
...

My grandmother used to say
don't marry for money
but stay open-minded.
...

So good to be home
and out of the heat.
All those excess people reminded I'm alone
as I explored the busy Chicago streets.
...

O GOD! in danger's darkest hour,
In battle's deadliest field,
Thy name has been our Nation's tower,
Thy truth her help and shield.
...

Every Spring I look forward to the storms
of November that roll down from up north

Green trees and warm sun adumbrates
...

(Being a Chant of the American Soap-Box and the Russian Revolution.)


O market square, O slattern place,
...

Good ev'nin', Mis' Priest.
I jest stepped in to tell you Good-bye.
Yes, it's all over.
...

I have two monuments besides this granite obelisk:
One, the house I built on the hill,
With its spires, bay windows, and roof of slate;
The other, the lake-front in Chicago,
...

Fragrant breezes in the South
melt to melodies round small fires
mount tree limbs
with bodies black
...

The West Village by then was changing; before long
the rundown brownstones at its farthest edge
would have slipped into trendier hands. She lived,
impervious to trends, behind a potted hedge of
...

Tough streets of Chicago, you made me who I am.
Tough streets of Chicago, for me you had a plan.
You forced me to observe, what kids my age did not.
You taught me to look and see, always looking for a plot.
...

Scrambled eggs and whiskey
in the false-dawn light. Chicago,
a sweet town, bleak, God knows,
but sweet. Sometimes. And
...

Are these connections coincidences or fate,
When the time for love and hope is late;
Could it be possible buried hearts to live
Unaware of love they guard concealed?
...

Whereas, good friend, it doth appear
You do possess the notion
To his awhile away from here
To lands across the ocean;
...

LAST week — the Lord be praised for all His mercies
To His unworthy servant! — I arrived
Safe at the Mission, via Westport; where
...

Childhood rememberances are
always a drag if you're Black
...

I was a gun-smith in Odessa.
One night the police broke in the room
Where a group of us were reading Spencer.
And seized our books and arrested us.
...

From Chicago to Mumbai
Srinagar to Chennai,
I had to deal
With extremes:
...

Hungry Mungry sat at supper,
Took his knife and spoon and fork,
Ate a bowl of mushroom soup, ate a slice of roasted pork,
Ate a dozen stewed tomatoes, twenty-seven deviled eggs,
...

In December 1930, Einstein made a trip
To United States with his wife Elsa, again.
Elsa was in charge of managing Einstein's
Meetings, with press, officials, celebrities, so on.
...

Beautiful, black-eyed boy,
O lithe-limbed Beeshareen!
Face that finds no maid coy,
Page for some peerless queen:
...

A spark from heaven travelled on to the earth in 1963!
He was indebted to mother for his knowledge of efflorescence,
Stating “brothers and sisters of America”, he, a speaker of eloquence,
At Parliament of World’s Religions in Chicago with eminence
...

💓 💏 💓

We married, on your birthday!
In San Francisco City Hall.
...

GAUNT in the midst of the prairie,
She who was once so fair;
Charred and rent are her garments,
Heavy and dark like cerements;
...

Saw the down side of Chicago. As on
a late night, into a bus station, groggy,
we hobbled. As faces turned with discern.
Then reflecting, times of hard lessons,
...

The younger years may fade but childhood remains within
Like a constant trace which can never be erased by time.
Always bound to a paradise that is evergreen
Where all poets never lose any enchanting rhyme.
...

TO

KINGS OF GENOCIDE in any place of world
...

The neighborhood described in this poem is in the University of Chicago area, as it existed over 60 years ago. Most of it no longer exists, due to one of the first Urban Renewal programs in the United States. The 'Bomb' refers to the atom bomb, of which the University had a large part in the planning. I worked there for a short time. I wanted a picture of that corner for my poem 'Lost', and Ms. Schlesinger kindly sent it to me, so I wrote this poem.

Dear, Dear, Ms. Schlesinger
You are the messenger
...

What do I want in these rooms papered with visions of money?
How much can I make by cutting my hair? If I put new heels on my shoes,
...

I am in the middle of this book about President Obama.
I am from Chicago, He is from Chicago.
He did his community work in the neighborhood where I grew up.
He was a senator from my old neighborhood of Hyde Park.
...

-Albert Parsons
went to his death
singing Annie Laurie;
didn't another have
...

Bin Laden was killed, the terminator had a child out of wedlock,
and the IMF president is in Riker's what more could top this?
Is Ronald McDonald Having a Mid-Life Crisis?
Apparently kids now days are not amused by him anymore,
...

Sing, O Muse, in treble clef,
A little song of the A.E.F.,
And pardon me, please, if I give vent
To something akin to sentiment.
...

Scatter to the four winds
What relatives do when the subject of religion and politics comes up at thanksgiving dinner.
...

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 Massachusetts.


I
...

If you are dreaming,
You are living.
Machines cannot dream....!
If you are loving,
...

Although she’s mopping the kitchen floor,
Ella is crying.

Words come out of her husband’s mouth.
...

The railroad dick looked straight at him, eyes unwavering, beady-eyed, menacing, and Harry counted his change to see if there was enough for a bribe; searched his thoughts for an escape route, but he was not as young as he used to be and the dick was young, legs like a deer.
...

My uncle Dan
was a Harlem Man
danced extra light on his feet
smiles like radiant sun
...

She sailed upon a gentle sea of melancholy-brave oars dipping.

She was awash with long ago laments which I could not guess.
Her movements were slow.
...

At ten I caught fireflies
in the Chicago night
cupping them in my hands
giving them to you
...

Each of us
when we reached 14
would make the Visit to
...