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Walt Whitman in the Civil War Hospitals Prescient, my hands soothing their foreheads, by my love I earn them. In their presence I am wretched as death. They smile to me of love. They cheer me and I smile. These are stones in the catapulting world; they fly,bury themselves in flesh, in a wall, in earth; in midair break against each other and are without sound. I sent them catapulting. They outflew my voice towards vacant spaces, but I have called them farther, to the stillness beyond, to death which I have praised. Be Like Me I will walk, if I must, in a crowd, so that I am kind. I cannot think, as if I had lost something that love comes from. I do not even know to whom I am talking. I break off and try to revise. Someone comes by and whispers, "Be like me." And Step I understand myself in relation to a stone, flesh and bone. Shall I bow down 44 | Poems of the 1960s ...

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