River Roads

Let the crows go by hawking their caw and caw.
They have been swimming in midnights of coal mines somewhere.
Let ’em hawk their caw and caw.

Let the woodpecker drum and drum on a hickory stump. 
He has been swimming in red and blue pools somewhere hundreds of years 
And the blue has gone to his wings and the red has gone to his head. 
Let his red head drum and drum.

Let the dark pools hold the birds in a looking-glass. 
And if the pool wishes, let it shiver to the blur of many wings, old swimmers from old places.

Let the redwing streak a line of vermillion on the green wood lines. 
And the mist along the river fix its purple in lines of a woman’s shawl on lazy shoulders.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on August 21, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“River Roads” was included in Carl Sandburg’s Cornhuskers (Henry Holt and Company, 1918). According to Alfred Kreymborg, in his review of the book that appeared in Poetry vol. 13, no. 3 (December 1918), the poem “introduces Sandburg’s varied use of the device of repetition [. . .].” Among the poem’s repetitions are not only the different species of birds, such as crows, woodpeckers, and redwings, but the various colors of the different birds and their surroundings, as well as the speaker’s references to long spans of time and long-abiding structures, such as coal mines, forests, and bodies of water, from which the birds emerge, as if primordially. The following year, in The New Era in American Poetry (Henry Holt and Company, 1919), Louis Untermeyer cited the poem as “an example of a mood that Sandburg mirrors so skilfully, a cloudy loveliness reflected in the hazy outlines of the free-rhythmed, unrhymed lyric [. . .].”