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A continuing selection of classic and contemporary poems.

Soiled Dove

Carl Sandburg

Let us be honest; the lady was not a harlot until she
     married a corporation lawyer who picked her from
     a Ziegfeld chorus.
Before then she never took anybody’s money and paid
     for her silk stockings out of what she earned singing
     and dancing.
She loved one man and he loved six women and the
     game was changing her looks, calling for more and
     more massage money and high coin for the beauty
     doctors.
Now she drives a long, underslung motor car all by herself,
     reads in the day’s papers what her husband is
     doing to the inter-state commerce commission, requires
     a larger corsage from year to year, and wonders
     sometimes how one man is coming along with
     six women.
Online text © 1998-2008 Poetry X. All rights reserved.
From Chicago Poems | Henry Holt & Company, 1916
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