Fifteen years ago in August, I was about to become a high school senior. I had gotten my driver's license within the previous year. I had turned seventeen a couple of months earlier, and I was trying to figure out where to go to college. In a
few respects, things haven't changed since - I still have the same haircut, I'm still single, and I still look too young for my age. But in far more numerous ways my life has changed over the past fifteen years. I graduated from high school, college (the second one, after transferring from the first), and grad school. I went to Russia once, Canada three times, and moved to Florida (for now). And I've successfully held six different jobs, the most recent two in my specialized field of study. Birthdays (including my 30th) and holidays have been celebrated, vacations taken, and time spent with family and friends.
It's been a wonderful fifteen years, even when I was struggling with making decisions or my funds were tight or schoolwork loomed in a seemingly never-ending parade of papers and exams or when I was far away from home. But wonderful though these years have been, they haven't lessened how very much I've missed you, Pop. I'll find a green place to read this aloud at some point today, as I have for the previous fourteen Augusts, but I thought that this blog being devoted to poetry, albeit normally a different kind, it was only fitting to post it here as well:
| A child said, What is the grass? | |
| by Walt Whitman |
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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.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful
green stuff woven.
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we
may see and remark, and say Whose?
Or I guess the grass is itself a child. . . .the produced babe
of the vegetation.
Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow
zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the
same, I receive them the same.
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them;
It may be you are from old people and from women, and
from offspring taken soon out of their mother's laps,
And here you are the mother's laps.
This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old
mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.
O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues!
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths
for nothing.
I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men
and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring
taken soon out of their laps.
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
What do you think has become of the women and
children?
They are alive and well somewhere;
The smallest sprouts show there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait
at the end to arrest it,
And ceased the moment life appeared.
All goes onward and outward. . . .and nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and
luckier.
Love you Pop, always.
Laurence J. Sasso, Sr.
(March 14, 1920 - August 17, 1995)
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