Captains and Cradles - For Walt Whitman
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This is a number two pencil sketch I did of Walt Whitman - I pray I have done him at least a semblance of justice.
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* There is one person I would bring back in a heartbeat, and that's my favorite human being of all-time, Walt Whitman - he literally changed my life with his poetry, and brought true beauty and joy to my life. Never underestimate the power of words. *
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Oh, My Dear Walter, how your words have slayed,
Humbled me, broken me, molded and remade.
To taste of your world, see above or below it,
Wit of a wordsmith, wry pith of a poet ...
To so construe love without using the phrase,
Scrawl the sinew of war, yet delight in the days.
To yawp of the grass - journeywork of the stars,
Help revivify a nation, attend to its scars.
Find grace among horrors, sift beauty from death,
The soul-pull of tides - briny buss of their breath.
To habit us all ... to the dazzle of light,
Celebrate ourselves, bequeath us the night.
Ask recurring questions of romance and life,
Of presidents, bootsoles, and a moldering strife.
Demons and mockingbirds, Paumanok's dunes ...
The pale, horrid witness of unstinted moons.
'Twas sad-blown, a bugle, convulsed, was a drum,
Yet exquisite, the dirge for a soldier and son.
The sorrow of clouds in a ravening sky,
The weep of a child should the Pleiades die.
Knit airy-fresh words, with uncommon phrases,
Draw Apollo and Neptune in all of their phases.
Be there adoration as hapless as mine?
Yet no soul more ardently leveled, supine ...
No writer has reached deeper into my heart,
Idioms and phrases ... such allurement, impart.
Ah, yes, what I'd give to have just one chat,
With the rare human being who afforded all that.
And maybe I'm biased, if perhaps to a fault,
But the name of MY Captain, O Captain ...
Is WALT.
Copyright © Gregory Richard Barden | Year Posted 2017
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