dots-menu
×

Home  »  The New Poetry  »  The Harbor

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

The Harbor

By Carl Sandburg

PASSING through huddled and ugly walls,

By doorways where women haggard

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.