Poem of Wonder at the Resurrection of Wheat
{Walt Whitman}
Something startles me where I thought I
was safest,
I withdraw from the still woods I loved,
I will not go now on the pastures to walk,
I will not strip my cloths from my body to meet
my lover the sea,
I will not touch my flesh to the earth, as to other
flesh, to renew me
How can the ground not sicken of men?
How can you be alive, you growths of spring?
How can you furnish health, you blood of herbs,
roots, orchards and grain?
Are they continually putting distempered
corpses in the earth?
Is not every continent worked over and over with
sour dead?
Where have you disposed of those carcasses of
drunkards and gluttons of so many generations?
Now I am terrified at the earth! it is calm
and patient
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with
such endless successions of diseased corpses
It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused
fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks, it's prodigal,
annual sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts
such leavings from them at last.
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