If I wera poet
20/02/14 05:33
It was a century ago this month that Carl Sandburg penned the most iconic of his Chicago poems. People all across the world, even if they are not familiar with Sandburg or his poetry, probably know what city is being referred to with the lines that open poem:
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:
The description is reworked and some of the key phrases are used again to end the poem:
“Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.”
Of course Chicago has changed a lot in a hundred years.
The closing of the Union Stock Yards was fresh news when we moved to Chicago in 1978. The official closing had occurred in 1971 after decades of decline and decentralization in the meatpacking industry. There was still a lot of empty land and old corrals in the area of Halstead and 47th Street when we arrived. The Back of the Yards neighborhood was filled with housing occupied by recent immigrants and a few refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia were beginning to arrive. But the stockyards no longer offered the jobs they once had for unskilled workers.
The decline of the stockyards had begun decades before, with the advanced technology that emerged following the Second World War. Once you have refrigerated rail cars, the need to ship live animals and sloughier them in population centers goes away.
The famous stockyards that literally defined the city in the late 19th century, powered by railroad money, and in the teens when Sandburg wrote his poem were the largest stockyards in the world and the focus of international companies. The Chicago Board of Trade was the largest commodity market in the world at one point. By the mid 1920’s more meat was being processed in Chicago than in any other place in the world.
“Hog butcher for the world” wasn’t an exaggeration. It was a description.
And Sandburg wasn’t gentle in his description of the rough American city. In the center of the poem, he listed the sins of the city:
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys. And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again. And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
But his defense of the city was a sure as his acknowledgment of its flaws:
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them: Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Sandburg, of course was a genius and his poem helped shape the identity of the city whose wider metropolitan area is now home to 2.7 million people. It is the largest city in the center of our nation.
Big cities don’t tend to be located in the center of nations. They tend to be found on the coasts.
And I was a resident of Chicago for only four years. My story is not really a Chicago story at all.
But no one has written the iconic poem of the town of my birth:
Wool shipper of the west
Fly fisher, gunsmith,
Playground of the wealthy and rancher of dudes
Cattle rancher staring down sheepherder
The biggest wind of the Big Sky Country.
And no one has written the iconic poem of the city where I have lived more years than any other:
Motorcycle destination of the world
Hospital, bankers for ranches
Resting place for supersonic bombers and the crews that support them
Bearer of floods, builder of green space
Show us a mountain and we’ll improve it by carving.
But I am no poet.
And I am no Sandburg
And I cannot begin to find the right words.
I would admit the flaws of my city. We sometimes live as if we have forgotten that long before the settlers arrived this land was known to be sacred and holy and sometimes we fail to show the respect for this land that it deserves.
I have visited the men sleeping under the bridge and served meals to hungry folks at the mission. I have witnessed the suspicion and tension between law enforcement personnel and native residents on our city’s north side, and felt the tensions rise in council meetings. I have seen the strength in the lives of flood survivors and those who came a bit too close to Wounded Knee II back in the seventies and I have also know their suspicion for newcomers. I know that we have favored and funded prisons more lavishly than our schools and how we raise our children to leave the state in search of their vocations.
But I would challenge any who would criticize my town to show me another with people who are more generous or quicker to help a neighbor. Show me another town where people rally to support the families of fallen police officers and stand behind those who serve us. Find another where community theatre flourishes and public artwork is privately funded beyond expectation. There is no other place already home to incredible outdoor sculpture that would commission a major sculpture at the heart of a new city square. There are no other cities with finer high school orchestras or drama departments.
We are not perfect. But we are real.
And I can feel great pride in my city.
But then again, until the council makes it annexation vote later this year, I still live out of town.
And then again, I am no Sandburg.
I’m not even a poet.
But if I were, I would write a poem about Rapid City.