Poetry Archives

A continuing selection of classic and contemporary poems.

Carl Sandburg

Crimson is the slow smolder of the cigar end I hold,
Gray is the ash that stiffens and covers all silent the fire.
(A great man I know is dead and while he lies in his
     coffin a gone flame I sit here in cumbering shadows
     and smoke and watch my thoughts come and go.)

Online text © 1998-2008 Poetry X. All rights reserved.
From Chicago Poems | Henry Holt & Company, 1916

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Tags, sometimes called “folksonomies,” are words that describe or categorize a poem, like “20th century modernism” or “Italian sonnet”. Tags can help you find poems that have something in common, based on how other people classify them.

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