Sunday morning: a little Whitman…

“From this hour, I ordain myself loos’d from limits and imaginary lines.”

– Walt Whitman

From Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”

“A child said  What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands,

How could I answer the child?

I do not know what it is any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition,

out of hopefull green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,

A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,

Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners,

that we may see and remark, and say Whose?

 Or I guess the grass is itself a child,

the produced babe of the vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,

And it means,

Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,

Growing among black folks as among white,

Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff,

I give them the same, I receive them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Tenderly will I use you curling grass,

It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,

It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,

It may be you are from old people, or from offspring

taken soon out of their mothers’ laps.

And here you are the mothers’ laps.

This grass is very dark

to be from the white heads of old mothers,

Darker than the colorless beards of old men,

Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,

And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.

I wish I could translate

the hints about the dead young men and women,

And the hints about old men and mothers,

and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.

What do you think have become of the young and old men?

And what do you think have become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere,

The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,

And if ever there was it led forward life,

and does not wait at the end to arrest it,

And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,

And to die is different from what any one supposed,

and luckier.”

 

~ from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass

Every moment….a miracle

Every moment of light and dark is a miracle.

~ Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman

Today is the birthday of Walt Whitman (1819 – 1892)

 

 “A morning-glory at my window

satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.”

– Quotation by Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman

 

Video by davidmichaelgimes