Poetry Friday -- Walt Whitman Explains the Water Cycle

And who art thou? said I to the soft-falling shower,

Which, strange to tell, gave me an answer, as here translated:

I am the Poem of Earth, said the voice of the rain,

Eternal I rise impalpable out of the land and the bottomless sea,

Upward to heaven, whence, vaguely form'd, altogether changed,

and yet the same,

I descend to lave the drouths, atomies, dust-layers of the globe,

And all that in them without me were seeds only, latent, unborn;

And forever, by day and night, I give back life to my own origin,

and make pure and beautify it;

(For song, issuing from its birth-place, after fulfillment, wandering,

Reck'd or unreck'd, duly with love returns.)

by Walt Whitman

from Leaves of Grass

published in The Nature Company's FROM THIS SOIL: SELECTED POEMS BY WALT WHITMAN

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