In this late hour
A hundred years after
Your majestic death
I read all of them
One by one great poem
As if you were writing them today
Poet of the soul and the body
Of the leaves of grass and democracy
Poet of nature and man
Walt Whitman
I’ll write about everything to you
All that happened a hundred years ago
Surely no secrets between us
Apart from death perhaps
And I borrow your words
Sung in the century past
For we to risk genocides
From within and without
And we have to say it out loud
In the face of the floods....
This is part of a much longer poem written in 1992.
This poem appeared in Al Jadid, Vol. 11, No. 53, 2005.
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