| Carl Sandburg (1878–1967). Smoke and Steel. 1922. |
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| VII. Passports |
| 14. Baltic Fog Notes |
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(Bergen)
SEVEN days all fog, all mist, and the turbines pounding through high seas. | |
| I was a plaything, a rat’s neck in the teeth of a scuffling mastiff. | |
| Fog and fog and no stars, sun, moon. | |
| Then an afternoon in fjords, low-lying lands scrawled in granite languages on a gray sky, | |
| A night harbor, blue dusk mountain shoulders against a night sky, | 5 |
| And a circle of lights blinking: Ninety thousand people here. | |
| Among the Wednesday night thousands in goloshes and coats slickered for rain, | |
| I learned how hungry I was for streets and people. | |
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| I would rather be water than anything else. | |
| I saw a drive of salt fog and mist in the North Atlantic and an iceberg dusky as a cloud in the gray of morning. | 10 |
| And I saw the dream pools of fjords in Norway … and the scarf of dancing water on the rocks and over the edges of mountain shelves. | |
| Bury me in a mountain graveyard in Norway. | |
| Three tongues of water sing around it with snow from the mountains. | |
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| Bury me in the North Atlantic. | |
| A fog there from Iceland will be a murmur in gray over me and a long deep wind sob always. | 15 |
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| Bury me in an Illinois cornfield. | |
| The blizzards loosen their pipe organ voluntaries in winter stubble and the spring rains and the fall rains bring letters from the sea. | |
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