We Are All Whitman: #2: Song of/to/My/Your/Self
What I assume you shall assume.
Walt Whitman (1)
This Self—Hispanic, Latin, blond, black,
olive-skinned, native and immigrant—
dispersed far and wide
was here with everyone, yesterday and again today;
today and tomorrow; does not stop,
virginal atom of nakedness and dust,
of Manhattan’s universal son
the uncaged cosmos
and the echoes’ whirlwind.
Child with the wisdom of questions,
offspring of poor and rich, of lettered and unlettered,
of rails, planting times, classes and cares,
which will sprout, embodied, with nothing forgotten,
seed in its newly bloodstained earth,
which gathers hands, pupils, voices,
the savor of oceans,
the smell of sweet jungles,
God's pollen, days and nights
at center of the Self that dances with many,
men, women, young people and old
in the light of the infinite’s furrows,
with open hands, without walls,
free roots of mine and everyone's
at the foot of the song
that now celebrates
without creeds or schools.
With all the colors that stir up their race,
Roman, Celtic, Hebrew, Moor,
Hispanic, Aborigine, with kingdoms of multitudes
fresh in the tree of life.
Grass, girl or boy child, suppliant germ
of love and timepieces in the atmosphere,
God of the promise and the future,
modern and ancient in the new people,
come and gone from among the old people,
humanity's heart in the moon, hands' mirror,
the breath of syllables.
Because it is voice, hum of green and dry leaves
that loves equally,
in the color of its time, the park that is, am,
are, today, here, yesterday and forever,
the mystery's imprecise territory.
This Self is Puerto Rican, Chicano,
from Cuba free dancer of merengues,
from Santo Domingo and all the Caribbean,
from El Salvador and Nicaragua.
It comes from Mexico, Central America,
from Costa Rica, Tikal, Guatemala,
from their rainforests, lakes of salt and honey,
from Panama, Colombia, Peru and Venezuela,
the corn crops of the Argentine pampas,
Chile's veins of grapes, Bolivia's reed flute,
from the Mayas, Quechuas, Aztecs, Incas,
from the Guaranís, from the Amazon, Ecuador,
from the Uruguay of the Charrúas and its shores,
gauchos, criollos, Europeans, mestizos,
mulattos, the fair-skinned, Turks, Asians, Syrian or Lebanese,
waifs, streetwalkers, huddled masses of Latin America
with their many names.
It is harassed and startled by propellers and shrapnel,
by ashes and the hammer’s hard-won pennies.
Boss and day laborer; still the job’s slave,
painter of trenches, resourceful creator of roofs, pavement
on the agony of yesterday’s blood and the even-now
of the Monday of beginnings and the Sunday of holy days.
It is expressed and is not expressed by welcomes,
the yowls of rejection and the sunless silence
of indifference, every day, gray hands.
It belongs to family and sometimes they invite it, other times exclude it
from family suppers and their menu of dawns;
when the assemblage is gathered, they have become used
to its only cooking, serving, or cleaning up after the meal.
It suffers now, and in the next gust of wind, the discriminating smoke
of random breath, for good or bad of those
who intoxicated breathe ignorance or haughtiness
without clusters of stars, mountains, heavenly clouds,
wellsprings of gifts and of meadows.
The dream of your creation, fatherland of many fatherlands,
at the same time defined and disturbed
in the ferment of capricious laws
that attacked freedom and happiness in their path
and the paths of all who signed your articles.
It likes and does not like the words, the eve
of silences, words dyed in the antagonism
of empires and conquests, welcomes, coffins and slights,
gold pieces received and robbed.
They will not destroy this Self, although it be teacher or student,
follower or leader. They tried without luck
because history and its soul, to which we belong
and it belongs in this cloth of substances and times,
do not allow it.
I am large, I contain multitudes.
They will not manage to deny me or ignore me or declare me undocumented:
I am written in you, in all,
as all are in me,
in clay and in the breeze's gentle sky,
in the delightful meaning of your body.
With the people’s wise voice, it complains and does not complain.
Like everyone, it triumphs in its defeats and loses, sometimes,
in the victories of bridges,
because the shank’s good fortune carries it inside
and outside of agony's navel.
It sings with the voice of ravaged fields,
the sweat of stria and its gifts,
the robust and oppressive body of cities.
It aims to be the river’s voice and not only of the forbidden,
but also strictly unknown voices.
If would not wish for entrance to a forest
whose roots it must avoid.
In everyone’s Self,
the poem’s universal soul,
in each innumerable Walt Whitman,
cosmos without rubrics,
wave among waves, shared worlds
inside vibrating yellow,
I dance, I smile, I cry:
I celebrate myself, and sing myself.
Copyright Credit: Luis Alberto Ambroggio, "We Are All Whitman: #2: “Song of/to/My/Your/Self” " from Todos somos Whitman/We Are All Whitman. Copyright © 2016 by Luis Alberto Ambroggio. Reprinted by permission of Arte Público Press.