The working girls in the morning are going to work-- <br /> long lines of them afoot amid the downtown stores <br /> and factories, thousands with little brick-shaped <br /> lunches wrapped in newspapers under their arms. <br />Each morning as I move through this river of young- <br /> woman life I feel a wonder about where it is all <br /> going, so many with a peach bloom of young years <br /> on them and laughter of red lips and memories in <br /> their eyes of dances the night before and plays and <br /> walks. <br />Green and gray streams run side by side in a river and <br /> so here are always the others, those who have been <br /> over the way, the women who know each one the <br /> end of life's gamble for her, the meaning and the <br /> clew, the how and the why of the dances and the <br /> arms that passed around their waists and the fingers <br /> that played in their hair. <br />Faces go by written over: "I know it all, I know where <br />the bloom and the laughter go and I have memories," <br /> and the feet of these move slower and they <br /> have wisdom where the others have beauty. <br />So the green and the gray move in the early morning <br /> on the downtown streets.<br /><br />Carl Sandburg<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/working-girls/
