Song of the Open Road’s Old Bearded Brother

I celebrate the long stride of Walt Whitman,
and what I celebrate in him I feel stirring also in myself—
for he is not confined to the sepia portrait,
nor to the Camden bed, nor to the ferry’s vanished wake,
but moves still in the broad chests of mechanics,
in the throats of women calling their children in at dusk,
in the whistle of freight trains crossing the plains.

I see him—hat tipped back, beard wind-tossed—
loafing and inviting his soul,
leaning against the rough plank fence of the Republic,
while the young nation, half-formed and fevered,
beats like a hammer on the anvil of his ribs.

O Walt! singer of the body electric,
cataloguer of carpenters, pilots, prostitutes, presidents,
lover of ferryboats and lilacs and the wounded laid in rows—
you walked among the amputated and the dying
and wrote not of despair but of the great, tidal Yes
that surges beneath the broken hull of every war.

You made room—
room in your lines long as prairie horizons,
room in your mouth for the slang of the street and the psalm of the Bible,
room for the slave, the runaway, the mother bending over the wash-tub,
room for the President and the prisoner,
room for me, for you, for the reader not yet born
who opens the book in a century you never saw
and finds himself addressed.

I hear you in the rattle of city scaffolds,
in the hiss of steam, in the hospital’s low midnight murmur;
I hear you in the pulse under my own wrist.
Your verses stride without rhyme, without apology,
like a laborer coming home with his sleeves rolled,
unashamed of sweat, unashamed of tenderness.

You sang of yourself and meant all of us.
You declared yourself large and containing multitudes,
and so gave permission to the rest of us
to admit the crowd within our ribs—
the saint and the scoundrel, the doubter and the believer,
the lover of men and women, of grass and of granite.

Grass!—you bent to it as to scripture,
each blade a letter in the green gospel of democracy.
You asked what it was, and let the child answer;
you let the question remain open as the sky.

And I, walking now on sidewalks poured long after your burial,
feel your rough hand clap my shoulder:
“Not I alone,” you seem to say,
“but you—
you must continue the song.”

So I take up the chant of breathing America—
its highways and heartlands, its griefs and jubilations—
and I do not tidy it, I do not trim it;
I let it sprawl and surge.

For you taught us that the self is not a sealed chamber
but a door flung wide at dawn,
and the world—
with its clamor, its wounds, its teeming, holy bodies—
comes striding in.