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- "A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;<br />
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.<br />
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.<br />
<br />
Or I guess if is the handkerchief of the Lord,<br />
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,<br />
Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?<br />
<br />
Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.<br />
<br />
Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,<br />
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,<br />
Growing among black folks as among white,<br />
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive then the same.<br />
<br />
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.<br />
<br />
Tenderly will I use you curling grass,<br />
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,<br />
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken,<br />
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them, soon out of their mother’s laps,<br />
And here you are the mothers’ laps.<br />
<br />
This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,<br />
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,<br />
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.<br />
<br />
O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,<br />
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.<br />
<br />
I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,<br />
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.<br />
What do you think has become of the young and old men?<br />
And what do you think has become of the women and children?<br />
<br />
They are alive and well somewhere,<br />
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,<br />
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,<br />
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.<br />
<br />
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,<br />
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier."<br />
<br />
Song of Myself VI,<br />
Walt Whitman (1819-1892) - Avg. rating:
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