On Chicago: They Will Say

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.

Carl Sandburg
Chicago Poems (1916)