1916: Chicago
second thoughts
i wish to god i never saw you, Mag.
i wish you never quit your job and came along with me.
i wish we never bought a license and a white dress
For you to get married in the day we ran off to a minister
and told him we would love each other and take care of each other
always and always long as the sun and the rain lasts anywhere.
Carl Sandburg, “Mag.” Having worked as a barbershop porter, milk-truck
driver, brickyard hand, and wheat harvester, Sandburg, at the age of twenty
in 1898, enlisted in an Illinois infantry regiment to serve in the Spanish-American War. He published Chicago poems in 1916, good Morning,
america in 1928, and his Pulitzer Prize–winning four-volume work of
history, abraham lincoln: The War Years, in 1939. He died at the age of
eighty-nine in 1967.
