“Your Very Flesh Shall Be A Great Poem”
This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.
© 2011
The Juice Bar 
I LOVE this piece! Love it. I have to read more Walt Whitman. Wow! Yes!
You and me both!!
Sent on the Now Network from my Sprint® BlackBerry
I discovered this piece from Walt (“I contain multitudes”) Whitman and “Song of Myself” when I was in 7th or 8th grade and it, along with To Kill a Mockingbird and Huck Finn and some Steinbeck stuff I read at that time changed me forever. Plus, Whitman begat Ginsberg–another debt poetry lovers owe the great weird beard. (Like the picture too, Lisa. Will you marry me BTW?)
Ha ha! Very sweet Paul 🙂
Sent on the Now Network from my Sprint® BlackBerry
I’ll build us a palace on the beach out there and sing sonnets to you under the moonlight, you in that great black hat of yours that you know I adore, dahling diva! (Your resistance is getting all wobbly, isn’t it.)
That Walt Whitman is something else!!!!! He makes me fly high with his words.
Roz