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Posts Tagged ‘Walt Whitman’

Dear Mr. Whitman,

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on September 20, 2025| 13 Comments »


 
I want to hear America singing
all those varied carols you mentioned.
But it’s noise now, Walt, more shouting 
than song. As if volume makes a leader.
Any singer knows being louder
just makes discord, and harmony
needs constant attunement
to every other singer.
I want to hear America listening.
Want a citizen chorus that knows
our voices are only as good as our ears.
I want a new song that begins
with a silence that stretches 
from sea to shining sea—
the kind of silence that holds
every one of us, every part of us.
And when the many parts do arise, 
glorious in their differences,
I want to hear inside them 
the careful attention that tunes
them to each other, I want to hear 
in our song the deep listening that makes
even the most uncomfortable dissonance 
beautiful.

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On Walt Whitman’s 200th Birthday

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on May 31, 2019| Leave a Comment »

 

 

When you wrote of the spider

launching through vacant space,

reeling from one sphere of meaning

 

to another, you didn’t know then

that you wrote that poem for me.

Two centuries later, this woman

 

reads about the bridges we are all

trying to form, and Walt, damned

if that wasn’t filament coming out

 

through your electric fingers.

 

 

 

https://poets.org/poem/noiseless-patient-spider

 

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I’m Trying to Learn, Walt Whitman

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on October 29, 2011| 1 Comment »

To me, every hour of the light and dark is a miracle.
—Walt Whitman

Balanced against morning frost
I do not see
the great blue heron
wading in the river
so I put it there

*

Meredith mentions
a student who insists
on painting
into the foreground
a rock

*

“All she needs is a darker color,”
Meredith says, “and a value
like a triangle
and the canvas
would be full of light”

*

You do not have
to be talented—even
my three year old girl
knows how to paint
something that makes her smile

*

It is not a painting,
this life, still
there was a heron here not
long ago, standing in frost
it was so beautiful

*

Here and not here,
light and dark,
so many years spent
debating the two—this morning
I see it, the river chimed in frost

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