[Skip Navigation]

Poetry Archives

A continuing selection of classic and contemporary poems.

The Has-Been

Carl Sandburg

A stone face higher than six horses stood five thousand
     years gazing at the world seeming to clutch a secret.
A boy passes and throws a niggerhead that chips off the
     end of the nose from the stone face; he lets fly a
     mud ball that spatters the right eye and cheek of the
     old looker-on.
The boy laughs and goes whistling “ee-ee-ee ee-ee-ee.”
     The stone face stands silent, seeming to clutch a
     secret.
Online text © 1998-2008 Poetry X. All rights reserved.
From Chicago Poems | Henry Holt & Company, 1916
Add Keyword Tags

Separate each tag with a space. You may add as many tags as you'd like to each poem.

What are tags?
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.

More Info

This site will work and look better in a browser that supports web standards, but it is accessible to any Internet device.