Pages

Sunday, November 09, 2014

I Do Not Doubt...




FAITH POEM
—Walt Whitman

I NEED no assurances—I am a man who is
         pre-occupied of his own soul;
I do not doubt that whatever I know at a given
         time, there waits for me more which I do not
         know;
I do not doubt that from under the feet, and beside
         the hands and face I am cognizant of, are
         now looking faces I am not cognizant of—
         calm and actual faces;
I do not doubt but the majesty and beauty of the
         world is latent in any iota of the world;
I do not doubt there are realizations I have
         no idea of, waiting for me through time
         and through the universes—also upon this
         earth;
I do not doubt I am limitless, and that the uni-
         verses are limitless—in vain I try to think
         how limitless;
I do not doubt that the orbs, and the systems of
         orbs, play their swift sports through the air
         on purpose—and that I shall one day be
         eligible to do as much as they, and more than
         they;
I do not doubt there is far more in trivialities,
         insects, vulgar persons, slaves, dwarfs, weeds,
         rejected refuse, than I have supposed;
I do not doubt there is more in myself than I have
         supposed—and more in all men and women
         —and more in my poems than I have
         supposed;
I do not doubt that temporary affairs keep on and
         on, millions of years;
I do not doubt interiors have their interiors, and
         exteriors have their exteriors—and that the
         eye-sight has another eye-sight, and the hear-
         ing another hearing, and the voice another
         voice;
I do not doubt that the passionately-wept deaths
         of young men are provided for—and that the
         deaths of young women, and the deaths of
         little children, are provided for;
I do not doubt that wrecks at sea, no matter
         what the horrors of them—no matter whose
         wife, child, husband, father, lover, has gone
         down—are provided for, to the minutest
         point;
I do not doubt that shallowness, meanness, malig-
         nance, are provided for;
I do not doubt that cities, you, America, the
         remainder of the earth, politics, freedom,
         degradations, are carefully provided for;
I do not doubt that whatever can possibly happen,
         anywhere, at any time, is provided for, in
         the inherences of things.

________________________

—Medusa