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Home  »  Chicago Poems  »  5. The Harbor

Carl Sandburg (1878–1967). Chicago Poems. 1916.

5. The Harbor

PASSING through huddled and ugly walls

By doorways where women

Looked from their hunger-deep eyes,

Haunted with shadows of hunger-hands,

Out from the huddled and ugly walls,

I came sudden, at the city’s edge,

On a blue burst of lake,

Long lake waves breaking under the sun

On a spray-flung curve of shore;

And a fluttering storm of gulls,

Masses of great gray wings

And flying white bellies

Veering and wheeling free in the open.