Poetry Thursday - Portrait of a motor car, by Carl Sandberg

As seen in Junior Voices

Portrait of a motor car

It's a lean car ... a long legged dog of a car ...    a grey-ghost eagle car.
The feet of it eat the dirt of a road ... the wings of it eat the hills.

Danny the driver dreams of it when he sees women in red skirts and red sox in his sleep.
It is in Danny’s life and runs in the blood of him … a lean gray-ghost car.

Carl Sandburg (1878–1967). From Cornhuskers,  1918.

Cornhuskers, a collection of 103 poems, earned a Pulitzer Prize Special Letters Award in 1919. A free download is available here.

The first lines of the "lean car" were found in Junior Voices ... The first book, edited by Geoffrey Summerfield and published in 1970, the first of four volumes. A bit of background to those anthologies is here. 

"They not only didn’t look remotely like school books, but they didn’t read like school books either. They were full of surprises, and ... they had stunning imagery in colour. They were books you could sit and browse, and every page brought a fresh surprise."