Born May 31, 2024
10:48 a.m.
Here are some poems in honor of your shared birthday
with phenomenal American poet and transcendentalist
~ Walt Whitman ~
May 31, 1819 ~ March 26, 1892
Dear Little Dean,
In time, you and your siblings will read
Song of Myself, Song of the Open Road,
and so many more ~ click here for starters
Song of Myself
[opening stanza]
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same,
and their parents the same,
I, now . . . begin . . .
 |
| Aidan (just turned 2), Ellie (almost 4),
and Newborn Dean |
Kosmos
Who includes diversity and is Nature,
Who is the amplitude of the earth,
and the coarseness and sexuality of the earth,
and the great charity of the earth and the equilibrium also,
Who has not look’d forth from the windows the eyes for nothing,
or whose brain held audience with messengers for nothing,
Who contains believers and disbelievers,
who is the most majestic lover,
Who holds duly his or her triune proportion of realism,
spiritualism, and of the æsthetic or intellectual,
Who having consider’d the body finds all its organs and parts good,
Who, out of the theory of the earth and of his or her body
understands by subtle analogies all other theories,
The theory of a city, a poem, and of the large politics of these States;
Who believes not only in our globe with its sun and moon,
but in other globes with their suns and moons,
Who, constructing the house of himself or herself,
not for a day but for all time, sees races, eras, dates, generations,
The past, the future, dwelling there, like space, inseparable together.
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