From “When Lilacs Last In the Dooryard Bloom’d” by Walt Whitman
“Lo, the most excellent sun so calm and haughty,
The violet and purple morn with just-felt breezes,
The gentle soft-born measureless light,
The miracle spreading bathing all, the fulfill’d noon,
The coming eve delicious, the welcome night and the stars,
Over my cities shining all, enveloping man and land.”
I’m still reading Leaves of Grass. Slowly, before I go to bed, when I wake in the night or early in the morning. Walt (I don’t think he would mind me using his name as if I know him, he seems, in his poems, to invite it) took me through the Civil War, from the first mention of it to the end and after.
Now I’m reading about President Lincoln, recently dead in terms of lilacs blooming. That is where the except of the poem above is from.
But this piece of poem came to me in my time, in my life at this moment. It’s the feeling I get when I sit meditating in the morning. There is no Lincoln in it for me. But there is eternity.
