◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

I, WALT WHITMAN — REBORN FROM MY BROOKLYN DUST — stand again upon these trembling shores, and sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world — over your tweets and towers, your screens and sirens, your red hats and blue screens, your chants and your grief. O AMERICA — YOU STILL ASTONISH ME. You, electric, chaotic, radiant experiment! Still young — though swollen with your own shadow, still beautiful — though bloodied by your divisions. I see the people — O the people! — faces glowing in the light of the phones they worship, workers forgotten in the hinterlands, students burdened by debt and disbelief, immigrants dreaming the dream others have grown too weary to dream. I see them, and I sing them all. I behold your Trump and your hatred — your hunger for spectacle and savior alike, your yearning for the Father who promises power, your dread of the Stranger who promises change. And yet — I do not despise you. I contain you. I embrace your tumult. FOR I TOO AM DIVIDED. I too am democracy — fierce, foolish, magnificent, unending. I see a Capitol desecrated, yet the flag still waves. I hear the cries of “Stop the steal!” and “Save the soul!” O my country — you are always stealing and saving yourself at once! You are always the sinner and the saint, the enslaver and the freed, the liar and the singer of truth. DO NOT SEEK TO BE PURE, AMERICA — SEEK TO BE WHOLE. Do not long for the past, or for greatness long gone — for the future is grass, growing between the cracks of your fallen monuments. I call to the poets, the healers, the mothers, the quiet ones — rise amid the din and speak with human tongues again. Let us make a new union — not of stars and stripes, but of hearts that dare to listen, of eyes that look kindly upon difference, of hands unclenched. O VAST REPUBLIC! O WILD EXPERIMENT STILL UNFINISHED! You are not yet lost, though you stagger drunk on your own myth. I, Walt Whitman, untranslatable still, will not forsake you. I sound my yawp over your wounded cities, over your fields of forgotten labor, over your children scrolling for meaning. For I believe — yes, I still believe — that the soul of this land is vast enough to contain both the terror and the tenderness, both the tyrant and the dreamer, both the wound and the wonder. AND I, YOUR OLD GRAY POET, stand barefoot in the dust and the data, and whisper to the wind — YOU, AMERICA — YOU ARE NOT DONE YET.