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They Will Say

by Carl Sandburg, 1916

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.

Published in Chicago Poems
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