The Weekly Whitman
No. 3: April 19, 2020

I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world.
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,
nor cease the moment life appears.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
The converging objects of the universe perpetually flow,
Round and round we go, all of us, and ever come back thither,
And to die is different from what any one supposed.

I know I am solid and sound,
I know I am deathless,
I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter’s compass.
And whether I come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or ten million years,
I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.

My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite.
I laugh at what you call dissolution,
And I know the amplitude of time.




excerpted and adapted from Leaves of Grass
1892

Prompt:
What line resonates with your day today?

What phrase mirrors something you experienced in the past week?