This Compost — National Poetry Month

This Compost

1

Something startles me where I thought I was safest,
I withdraw from the still woods I loved,
I will not go now on the pastures to walk,
I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my 

   lover the sea,
I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other 

   flesh to renew me.

O how can it be that the ground itself does not 

   sicken?
How can you be alive you growths of spring?
How can you furnish health you blood of herbs,
   roots, orchards, grain?

Are they not continually putting distemper'd corpses 

   within you?
Is not every continent work'd over and over with 

   sour dead?

Where have you disposed of their carcasses?
Those drunkards and gluttons of so many 

   generations?
Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and 

   meat?
I do not see any of it upon you to-day, or perhaps 

   I am deceiv'd,
I will run a furrow with my plough, I will press my 

   spade through the sod and turn it up underneath,
I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat.
2

Behold this compost! behold it well!
Perhaps every mite has once form'd part of a sick 

   person--yet behold!
The grass of spring covers the prairies,
The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in 

   the garden,
The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward,
The apple-buds cluster together on the 

   apple-branches,
The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale 

   visage out of its graves,
The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the 

   mulberry-tree,
The he-birds carol mornings and evenings while 

   the she-birds sit on their nests,
The young of poultry break through the 

   hatch'd eggs,
The new-born of animals appear, the calf is dropt 

   from the cow, the colt from the mare,
Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato's dark 

   green leaves,
Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk, the lilacs 

   bloom in the dooryards,
The summer growth is innocent and disdainful 

   above all those strata of sour dead.

What chemistry!
That the winds are really not infectious,
That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash 

   of the sea which is so amorous after me,
That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all 

   over with its tongues,
That it will not endanger me with the fevers that 

   have deposited themselves in it,
That all is clean forever and forever,
That the cool drink from the well tastes so good,
That blackberries are so flavorous and juicy,
That the fruits of the apple-orchard and the orange-

   orchard, that melons, grapes, peaches, plums, 

   will none of them poison me,
That when I recline on the grass I do not catch 

   any disease,
Though probably every spear of grass rises out of 

   what was once a catching disease.

Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm 

   and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with 

   such endless successions of diseas'd corpses,
It distills such exquisite winds out of such 

   infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, 

   annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts 

   such leavings from them at last.

by Walt Whitman 

courtesy poets.org