It is easy to come here a stranger and show the whole works, write a book, fix it all up — it is easy to come and go away a muddle-headed pig, a bum and a bag of wind.
Go to it and remember this city fished from its depths a text: "independent as a hog on ice."
Venice is a dream of soft waters, Vienna and Bagdad recollections of dark spears and wild turbans; Paris is a thought in Monet gray on scabbards, fabrics, façades; London is a fact in a fog filled with the moaning of transatlantic whistles; Berlin sits amid white scrubbed quadrangles and torn arithmetics and testaments; Moscow brandishes a flag and repeats a dance figure of a man who walks like a bear.
Chicago fished from its depths a text: Independent as a hog on ice.
This is part 4 of a long, 10-part poem, The Windy City.
It appeared in Sandburg's poetry collection, Slabs of the Sunburnt West.
Poetry Atlas has many poems about Chicago, many of them by Sandburg.