Page:Leaves of Grass (1860).djvu/36

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28
Leaves of Grass.

Not words, not music or rhyme I want — not custom
or lecture, not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.

24.I mind how once we lay, such a transparent summer
morning,
How you settled your head athwart my hips, and
gently turned over upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and
plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,
And reached till you felt my beard, and reached till
you held my feet.

25.Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and
joy and knowledge that pass all the art and
argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of
my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of
my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers,
and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love,
And limitless are leaves, stiff or drooping in the
fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
And mossy scabs of the worm-fence, and heaped
stones, elder, mullen, and pokeweed.

26.A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me
with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what
it is, any more than he.