We watch from windows or street corners,
with protection -- without -- hunkering
down. . . . We are not safe.
Some poets write of their relationship with Whitman. Davi Walders of Chevy Chase says her mother tried to lure her into "Leaves of Grass," to no avail: Young Walders
could not imagine a life in his same city,
taking the same roads, listening to rain between
the same green islands, wandering along his broad
Potomac shores.
She only imagined it much later, after her mother was gone and she had "wandered out into cool air under mysterious stars."
Hilary Tham, poetry editor of the Potomac Review, recalls how after 9/11,
we all went on, each in our finite separate lives, with
their meals and minutia of daily tasks
under the disquieted heavens of that afternoon
so swift passing, so slow passing. . . . And I am glad you did not see this,
