Throwback Thursdays at ClimbingSky feature posts I wrote over a 15 year period for various blogs. This was first posted on July 11th, 2011.

There are poets I love because they represent elusive/ideal/transcendent/otherworldly beauty: Yeats, Keats, Shelley, Milton, Blake, Byron. There are other poets I love because they represent familiar/democratic (small “d”)/transubstatiated/thisworldly beauty: Kooser, Heaney, Whitman, Frost, and Sandburg.

I still have my first volume of Carl Sandburg that I ever purchased, Honey and Salt. I bought it for $1.50 new in September 1976, according to a note I made in my 16-year-old hand on the inside front cover. Thirty-five years later it still sits on my shelf, one of only a few books that remain from my pre-college days.

This weekend while driving back from the Great Smoky Mountains, Sue and I decided at the last minute to stop by Galesburg, Illinois, to see Carl Sandburg’s birthplace. Since I had a long record for finding writer’s museums/homes closed at the times I have tried visiting, and since it was late Sunday morning, we did not expect it to be open. But we thought it was worth seeing anyway.

It was open and a wonderful tribute to wonderful poet.

“Wingtip” comes from the volume Honey and Salt. It is a simple poem, but one that I have always loved. At once elegant and democratic, easy and complex, it is the work of a poet in love with the world and with the things of this world. In a word, it is pure Sandburg.

Enjoy!

Wingtip
The birds – are they worth remembering?
Is flight a wonder and one wingtip a
space marvel?
When will man know what birds know?