Friday, November 4, 2016

November 4: Pulse Shootings, Walt Whitman, "I Saw in Louisiana A Live-Oak Growing"

Walt Whitman was a nurse in the Civil War.  Clerk in the Bureau of Indian Affairs.  Journalist.  Self-proclaimed Bard of America.  And he was gay.

Whitman was a lot of things to a lot of people.  If he were alive today, he would speak for the Syrian refugee.  Mexican immigrant.  Black man in the inner city.  Victim in the Florida Pulse shootings.  Hurricane Katrina survivor.  Child in Flint.  Basically, he would speak for everybody who can't speak for themselves.

Saint Marty doesn't think Whitman would sing Donald Trump's body electric.

I Saw in Louisiana A Live-Oak Growing

by:  Walt Whitman

I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,
All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,
Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,
But I wonder’d how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there without its friend near, for I knew I could not,
And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it, and twined around it a little moss,
And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room,
It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends,
(For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,)
Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love;
For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana solitary in a wide flat space,
Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near,
I know very well I could not.

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