Wilderness

Wilderness is a single, blazing prose poem that asks what happens when we try to fence out the wild. Sandburg addresses a builder erecting walls and asking where to keep the wolf, the mockingbird, the panther. The answer is devastating: they are already here, within us. 'I am the wolf who gnaws the bone in the snow.' This is not a poem about nature walks or pastoral beauty. It is a fierce declaration that civilization is a thin skin stretched over something ancient, hungry, and unbroken. Sandburg wrote for an America racing toward industrialization, and in this poem he offers not nostalgia but a kind of permission: to acknowledge the outlaw and the dreamer who live in every human chest. It is short enough to read in two minutes and haunted enough to return to for decades.