we get titles with these things now?

Subtitle: Poem of the Week

Walt Whitman was probably the second poet that I ever encoutnered. (The first being Dennis Lee.) When I was younger (we're talking about 3), my family went on a vacation to Bon Echo Provincial Park which is just beautiful. If you click on that link there's a beautiful picture of the park, where you can see some of the rocks in the park, which if you could see them up close, actually have petroglyphs (prehistoric artwork) drawn on them, which fascinated me as a child (as well as the fact that the lake was over 100 feet deep, which was so deep that even my dad couldn't touch the bottom). There is a nice monument to Whitman there, as the former owner of the park was a devotee of his work (and an early Canadian feminist), so I've chosen To You as this week's poem:

Whoever you are, I fear you are walking the walks of
dreams,
I fear these supposed realities are to melt from under your
feet and hands,
Even now your features, joys, speech, house, trade, manners,
troubles, follies, costume, crimes, dissipate away from you,
Your true soul and body appear before me,
They stand forth out of affairs, out of commerce, shops,
work, farms, clothes, the house, buying, selling, eating,
drinking, suffering, dying.

Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you
be my poem,
I whisper with my lips close to your ear,
I have loved many women and men, but I love none better
than you.

(There's more to the poem, just click on the link above to read the rest).