A whimsied notion, a full scented but invisible imagery,
a passing by, vagrant sensation, a distinctly indistinct memorization,
never certified, never was, yet always will be, stolid as mahogany,
two men
armed, engaged in, by, full embrace,
brothers but not brothers, friends in skins that never touched,
citizens of one continent united, yet each on a separate distant edge,
thus divided, thus impaired,
two islands,
both born and torn from one firmament,
each man,
firm in demeanor, infirm in wearied body,
their words were handshakes that bridged mountains and rivers
ranged and arrayed, as if the Creator created but to split them,
though clouded mists and rain squalls
from time to time obscured their vision,
belief was, that like the granite schist that bedrocked their common soil,
though quaked and fissured, the heat that united
and sometime cooled, their ardor, their pledge unspoken,
yet permanent and fixed like celestial combinations, the expectation,
their friendship
**shall duly flame again
Continuities
by Walt Whitman
(1819-1892)
Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost,
No birth, identity, form--no object of the world.
Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing;
Appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain.
Ample are time and space--ample the fields of Nature.
The body, sluggish, aged, cold--the embers left from earlier fires,
The light in the eye grown dim, shall duly flame again;
The sun now low in the west rises for mornings and for noons continual;
To frozen clods ever the spring's invisible law returns,
With grass and flowers and summer fruits and corn.
