Yarns of the People (From "The People, Yes")

Yarns of the People
(From "The People, Yes")

CARL SANDBURG

They have yarns

Of a skyscraper so tall they had to put hinges

On the two top stories so to let the moon go by,

Of one corn crop in Missouri when the roots

Went so deep and drew off so much water

The Mississippi riverbed that year was dry.

Of pancakes so thin they had only one side,
Of "a fog so thick we shingl'ed the barn and six feet out on the

fog,"
Of Pecos Pete straddling a cyclone in Texas and riding it to the

west coast where "it rained out under him,"
Of the man who drove a swarm of bees across the Rocky Mountains

and the Desert "and didn't lose a bee."
Of a mountain railroad curve where the engineer in his cab can

touch the caboose and spit in the conductor's eye,
Of the boy who climbed a cornstalk growing so fast he would have

starved to death if they hadn't shot biscuits up to him,"
Of the old man's whiskers: "When the wind was with him his

whiskers arrived a day before he did,"
Of the hen laying a square egg and cackling, "Ouch! " and of hens

laying eggs with the dates printed on them,
Of the ship capt@in's shadow: it froze to the deck one cold

winter night,
Of mutineers on that same ship put to chipping rust with rubber

hammers,
Of the sheep-counter who was fast and accurate: "I just count

their feet and divide by four,"
Of the man so tall he must climb a ladder to shave himself,
Of the runt so teeny-weeny it takes two men and a boy to see him,
Of mosquitoes: one can kill a dog, two of them a man,
Of a cyclone that sucked cookstoves out of the kitchen, up the

chimney flue, and on to the next town,
Of the same cyclone picking up wagon-tracks in Nebraska and

dropping them over in the Dakotas,
Of the hook-and-eye snake unlockin itself into forty pieces, each

piece two inches long, then in nine seconds flat snapping

itself together again,
Of the watch swallowed by the cow: when they butchered her a year

later the watch was running and had the correct time,
Of horned snakes, hoop snakes that roll themselves where they

want to go, and rattlesnakes carrying bells instead of

rattles on their tails,
Of the herd of cattle in California getting lost in a giant

redwood tree that had been hollowed out,
Of the man who killed a snake by putting its tail in its mouth so

it swallowed itself,
Of railroad trains whizzing along so fast they reached the

station before the whistle,
Of pigs so thin the farmer had to tic knots in their tails to

keep them from crawling through the cracks in their pens,
Of Paul Bunyan's big blue ox, Babe, measuring between the eyes

forty-two ax-handles and a plug of Star tobacco exactly,
Of John Henry's hammer and the curve of its swing and his singing

of it as " a rainbow round mv shoulder."

They have yarns . . .