By: Nathan
There are more among us, riches in blood,
coursing, calling, making us want
more than this, and so I miss you.
America expansive, Walt, I write to you now,
our borders enriched, quick up to your dreams,
eating up your rambling schemes
Oh, I sense, and am drenched with
your kindred fluid within me, and I honor your habit of
visiting the meadow marshes
in the evenings to admire the thrushes,
their singing sweetness you felt deepened
by the end of a long day's work more so than the clipped
morning chatter, and here we are, Walt,
you said you'd be here, and you are, I whisper
What buckets of luck have long gone dry, bones cracking,
but collective claret clots know why
that bucket of sinewy richness you supplied is still,
with vital fluid, extending, winding, and bending,
and the Red Squaw haunts, just like she did your mother,
living breathing in our mountains rivers and prairies,
a second addendum, or 3rd or 5th,
on your deathbed posthaste, I still crave,
Oh, Walt, we remain
captains, but shattered and barely rebuilt, broken down,
our pressmen, butchers, tanners,
specialties are fading,
we're consolidating, how do I explain?
I just know you know. You said you'd stay
Those men you sat in hospice with, our boys in gray and blue,
always in the evenings, our sins exposed, you claimed,
because that's when the medicines hit best
and they'd digest their food and talk to you, and then die
of their sacrificial wounds, gently, quietly,
crying for their mothers or wives,
were Godsent to you. You were there.
What greater poet, or even man, all around 2nd generation
mutliple vertabrae American of our spine, your blood entwining
to bind us all,
if I remember you, Walt.
