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The Harbor

by Carl Sandburg, 1916

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.

Published in Chicago Poems
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