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There is a solitude in seeing you,
Followed by your company when you are gone.
You are like heaven’s veils of lightning.
I cannot see till afterward
How beautiful you are.
There is a blindness in seeing you,
Followed by the sight of you when you are gone.
This poem is in the public domain, and originally appeared in Others for 1919; An Anthology of the New Verse (Nicholas L. Brown, 1920).
This veil
Of lavender and dawn
Floats off
Invisible,
And this of purple noon
Unwinds in wisdom,
Twitters, undulates,
Dips, darts,
And this of night
Circles around me singing
Fools, fools, fools,
Your blood is hot to-day.
It cools
When you are clay.
It joins the very clod
Wherein you look at God,
Wherein at last you see
The living God
The loving God,
Which was your enemy.
If only you were here, Walt Whitman,
To tell the largeness of this man!
For only you could forget in space his enemies—
You who saw Lincoln stand up before the faces of a city
Alone like this man,
Alone even when friended,
Alone with destiny;
You who saw him facing Manhattan,
Manhattan hating him,
Never a cheer—
That silence,
That anger,
That misunderstanding:
What would you saw now
Of this American,
This liberator,
This man of destiny?—
Choired by the voices of slaves who would be freemen