Loafe and Laze, Song of myself

Lately I’ve been revisiting Song of Myself by the poet Walt Whitman. On one hand it’s hard to believe he composed this in the 1890s (circa) and on the other the language and spellings are archaic. Then there is the very idea: loafing, a lazy summer day spent inspecting a blade of grass, smelling fresh-mown hay, no to-do list or worry about the upcoming presidential election, no social media or 24-hour news cycle.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

The summer is half over, which sends me into a frenzy. I need to grill out, go to a concert in the park, hop on my bike, camp out, eat more ice cream!!!

Whitman could care less about any of this.

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

As the Republican Convention winds down/balloons have all dropped and the Democratic Convention down the road in Chicago gets underway and protestors fill the streets, days of rage, remember:

I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

INSTEAD, take time, dwell with the finite, learn to listen to the grass, and , in the words of the poem and poet:

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love,
And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,

And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap’d stones, elder, mullein and poke-weed.