Walt Whitman's Sermon on Spirituality to a Certain Congregation of Worms

Open your mouth to the cease that surrounds,
what has been grief becomes ground.

Consider Adam, how dust befell deliverance,
consider Eve, how labor confines.

Oh ye of little space, through you the dead and lying
enter the living, you the belly, you the beast

to another existence, without you nothing creeps
the face of the earth, without you nothing cheats

that which is the only is.

Copyright © 2006 Lois Marie Harrod All rights reserved
from The MacGuffin
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission