The Harvest Moon, in Camden (Anniversarius 45)

And I came, on the night of the harvest moon,

this thirteenth tropical night of the cool ninth month,

and, as I had been beckoned by bell and raven,

I found myself before a familiar tomb,

and its door was ajar and full moon showed me

the undulating form of a great serpent

(black she was and beautiful, sleek of skin

as the Queen of Sheba) and she rose up

and welcomed me. “Enter!” she said, “You

have I called, as well as many others,
and only you have tread the dream-realm,
crossed seven thresholds to stand before me.

Are you not afraid?”

“Afraid at his tomb,

he at whose knees I learned to sing and write?
Much as I fear Death, I do not fear him!”

And a voice inside the sepulchre uttered:

“Come, be not at all fearful. Here there is peace,

though my soul is fitful and weeping.

“I am Walt Whitman, a man, a citizen of Camden.

Reach out and touch the stone of my father,

the stone behind which my mother sleeps.

Touch this rough stone behind which my bones,
my hair, my ever-sinewed limbs, cannot slumber;

least of all my two eyes, my third eye celestial,

my mouth that cannot cease its uttering.

“For it has come to me that the land is troubled.

I ask, Has it yet come to pass that a woman sits

in the chair of Jefferson and Lincoln? I fear not,

and it has come to me that the occupant who sits

in the White House in Washington is not a good

or a fair man; that his hands are full of gold

and not forgiveness; that a man who reads no books

attempts to make science; that corruption spreads

like black tar from a broken well across the land;

“That under poisoned air and water the earth quakes

fractured with the greedy extraction of gas,

that shale, which slept before the dreamings

of sauropods and tyrannosaurs, is rent

by force of water, o incompressible!

that the workmen no longer know

when their labor begins or ends, that the slaves

are not so called yet put on chains again, that men

of one color flee down the streets in terror of arms

and men of no color at all in rage pursue them;

that it is no shame among you that some are roofless

and many must bear the stain of beggary to eat;

that the sick, when they are healed, are told to pay

until their bank accounts are drained, their houses lost;

that worse than in debtors’ jails the poor abide

in tents on the sidewalk, poor-towns behind

the stench-rows of oil tanks and refineries;

that the limousine-rich sell death and addiction

while mothers plead for an unpoisoned tap

from which to feed and bathe their infants,

while the Cappuccino-fueled Civil Servant says,

“Well, everyone has to die of something”;

that refugee children are caged like rabbits;

that a man with a turban or a kippa, a woman

whose faith requires a head-scarf, shall endure

the clenched fist of an ignorant mob.

“If the occupant of the White House is not

a good and fair man, or a good and fair woman,

what hope is there for the shining star

that cannot emerge from the night-cloud?

“To these states I say, as I have always said,

but even more to the people, one by one:
Resist much, and obey little.

And failing this, must the dead emerge

from their tombs to admonish you?

Have you no poets or statesmen?”

With a great sigh, the voice went dead.

I heard only a distant siren, a gunshot,

what might have been a woman’s scream,

then silence. The great black snake,

which had stood erect through all the speaking,

sank to the granite floor of the tomb

and slid into the darkness. I stood,

my own shadow in solitary moonbeam

extended to the Good Gray Poet’s stone

at the back of his self-made mausoleum.