Walt Whitman as Guide
       

Turning a corner of lilacs, I keep on
towards home
with Whitman on my mind—
and arrive just as family is arriving
for Thanksgiving dinner.
The conversation there
of politics and money and who believes what
is why I went walking—to be ready to be quiet.
In the evening after everyone has left,
I sit near a window
open on the vacant lot across the street
with Leaves of Grass on my lap—
reading his sprawls across the page wondering
how it must have been to walk as he did
tramping past carpenters hammering,
millers milling, mothers with their children,
young men robust in their boldness
filling America with their singing
when it was vacant with so much of a future.

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Copyright © 2021 Tim Sherry All rights reserved
from Pages of White Sky
MoonPath Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission