Carl Sanburg - The People Yes

The people yes
The people will live on.
The learning and blundering people will live on.
They will be tricked and sold and again sold
And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,
The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback,
You can't laugh off their capacity to take it.
The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas.

The people so often sleepy, weary, enigmatic,
is a vast huddle with many units saying:
"I earn my living.
I make enough to get by
and it takes all my time.
If I had more time
I could do more for myself
and maybe for others.
I could read and study
and talk things over
and find out about things.
It takes time.
I wish I had the time."

The people is a tragic and comic two-face: hero and hoodlum:
phantom and gorilla twisting to moan with a gargoyle mouth:
"They buy me and sell me...it's a game...sometime I'll
break loose..."

from The People Yes by Carl Sanburg


Recently the word Socialism has been batted around by protesters and political pundits. Carl Sanburg's Socialism is not the perverted straw man of modern media shouting. It is instead something deeper, sharper and more meaningful. It is an acknowledgement of the glorious, primal drive or perseverance that human beings share at their most basic cores. It bears witness both the the glory of a modern world built from the brow sweat of resilient men and women and to the soul crushing hardships that the same world rends from their flesh.

Sanburg's words are terse, honed for maximum impact, not a syllable wasted. There are no victim's here, only those who have been done wrong, time and again, and who yet continue forward no matter how clumsy, mongrel and idiotic their stubborn progress may appear.

I had though about this poem since grade school. Then, in 2006, I was listening to n recording of Sci-fi author / futurist visionary Bruce Sterling's annual SXSW speech. 2006 was a pretty grim year and Sterling was bringing the The Fear™. Then, as a quasi-benediction, he closed by reading the above section from Sanburg's book length poem.

The conviction and emotion in his voice struck me like a cold slap across the face. A man for whom The Future was his stock and trade was read a poem from the depths of the Great Depression, the words resonanting as if they were crafted that very morning, was chilling. Since that moment this poem, sadly, becomes more prescient with ever passing year.

Buy The People Yes

Bruce Sterling reads from The People Yes at SXSW 06