I am singing to you <br />Soft as a man with a dead child speaks; <br />Hard as a man in handcuffs, <br />Held where he cannot move: <br /> <br />Under the sun <br />Are sixteen million men, <br />Chosen for shining teeth, <br />Sharp eyes, hard legs, <br />And a running of young warm blood in their wrists. <br /> <br />And a red juice runs on the green grass; <br />And a red juice soaks the dark soil. <br />And the sixteen million are killing. . . and killing <br />and killing. <br /> <br />I never forget them day or night: <br />They beat on my head for memory of them; <br />They pound on my heart and I cry back to them, <br />To their homes and women, dreams and games. <br /> <br />I wake in the night and smell the trenches, <br />And hear the low stir of sleepers in lines-- <br />Sixteen million sleepers and pickets in the dark: <br />Some of them long sleepers for always, <br />Some of them tumbling to sleep to-morrow for always, <br />Fixed in the drag of the world's heartbreak, <br />Eating and drinking, toiling. . . on a long job of <br />killing. <br />Sixteen million men.<br /><br />Carl Sandburg<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/killers/
