Whitmaniacs

This afternoon, our group, the Poets and Writers Coalition, will have a marathon reading of Walt Whitman's Song of Myself. I am reader No. 49 and here's what I will read:

And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to alarm me.
To his work without flinching the accoucheur comes,  
I see the elder-hand pressing receiving supporting,  
I recline by the sills of the exquisite flexible doors,  

And mark the outlet, and mark the relief and escape.

And as to you Corpse I think you are good manure, but that does not offend me,  

I smell the white roses sweet-scented and growing,  

I reach to the leafy lips, I reach to the polish'd breasts of melons.

And as to you Life I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths,  

(No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.)

I hear you whispering there O stars of heaven,  

O suns - O grass of graves - O perpetual transfers and promotions,  

If you do not say any thing how can I say any thing?
Of the turbid pool that lies in the autumn forest,  

Of the moon that descends the steeps of the soughing twilight,  

Toss, sparkles of day and dusk - toss on the black stems that decay in the muck,  

Toss to the moaning gibberish of the dry limbs.

I ascend from the moon, I ascend from the night,  

I perceive that the ghastly glimmer is noonday sunbeams reflected,  

And debouch to the steady and central from the offspring great or small.