Nature's Bookmark

In Leaves of Grass was a maple leaf red;
Walt Whitman’s poems to this day ring true.
Beauty abides even when things are dead.

Once long ago on Ohio farmstead,
Whitman and poetry came into view.
In Leaves of Grass was a maple leaf red.

So in the loft with hale bales for a bed,
I as a reader let the verses accrue.
Beauty abides even when things are dead.

Then I walked past the trees to clear my head;
I saw the leaves and assumed one would do.
In Leaves of Grass was a maple leaf red.

Whitman wrote poems of Abe and bloodshed;
I held the leaf and felt fall residue.
Beauty abides even when things are dead.

Thus once again to Walt Whitman I fled,
and turned to the page I long ago knew.
In Leaves of Grass was a maple leaf red;
beauty abides even when things are dead.


19 Lines (Villanelle)
Writer’s Cramp
September 24, 2013

Leaves of Grass is a poetry collection by the American poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892).
Whitman wrote about the Civil War, and of Abe Lincoln.