Song of Myself: Stalks and Stems

Today is my birthday. To celebrate I wrote a poem to myself this very early morning, a flagrant self-indulgence, a much shorter personalization of a very famous one*.

I celebrate myself, and sing myself.
As I am, I deserve to be. I am no victim of life because I am life.

I embrace my unironable wrinkles, etched by cycles of sun and clouds.
I embrace wild strands of gray hair, coarse and no longer repressed by the comb's convention.
I embrace the sagging chin, worn loose from keeping up.

I've heard the talk of beauty and blooms, of fecundity and fear.
But I do not listen.

Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world.

There never was so much beauty as now among stalks and stems.
Blooms bud, brighten and wither. Fruits swell, sweeten, and fall.
All grass and stars.
All grass and stars.

Where are you off to, lady?

I dare not loafe.
Let me fill my baskets with the destiny of a woman's labor,
part of the ceaseless folding and unfolding.

I do not call aloud to invite my soul.
Nor do I despise the priests, nor those that consult them.
Let me wash without worry,
My soul follows like the shadows on the line.

I, now fifty-one years old, simply am.
Hoping to cease not till death.

* Walt Whitman (1819-1892) Song of Myself