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A continuing selection of classic and contemporary poems.

They Will Say

Carl Sandburg

     Of my city the worst that men will ever say is this:
You took little children away from the sun and the dew,
And the glimmers that played in the grass under the great sky,
And the reckless rain; you put them between walls
To work, broken and smothered, for bread and wages,
To eat dust in their throats and die empty-hearted
For a little handful of pay on a few Saturday nights.
Online text © 1998-2009 Poetry X. All rights reserved.
From Chicago Poems | Henry Holt & Company, 1916
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