<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><h1 class="title page__title" id="page-title" style="line-height: 1.20301em; margin: 0px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; font-weight: 500; padding-bottom: 10px; letter-spacing: -2px; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2; background-color: rgb(252, 249, 249);"><font size="4" class="">This Compost</font></h1><div class="field-label-hidden field-name-body field field-type-text-with-summary" style="line-height: 24px; padding-right: 15px; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2; background-color: rgb(252, 249, 249); width: auto !important;"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.26316em;" class="">1<br class=""><br class="">Something startles me where I thought I was safest,<br class="">I withdraw from the still woods I loved,<br class="">I will not go now on the pastures to walk,<br class="">I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea,<br class="">I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to renew me.<br class=""><br class="">O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?<br class="">How can you be alive you growths of spring?<br class="">How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?<br class="">Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you?<br class="">Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead?<br class=""><br class="">Where have you disposed of their carcasses?<br class="">Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations?<br class="">Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?<br class="">I do not see any of it upon you to-day, or perhaps I am deceiv’d,<br class="">I will run a furrow with my plough, I will press my spade through the sod and turn it up underneath,<br class="">I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat.<br class=""><br class="">2<br class=""><br class="">Behold this compost! behold it well!<br class="">Perhaps every mite has once form’d part of a sick person—yet behold!<br class="">The grass of spring covers the prairies,<br class="">The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden,<br class="">The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward,<br class="">The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches,<br class="">The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves,<br class="">The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree,<br class="">The he-birds carol mornings and evenings while the she-birds sit on their nests,<br class="">The young of poultry break through the hatch’d eggs,<br class="">The new-born of animals appear, the calf is dropt from the cow, the colt from the mare,<br class="">Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato’s dark green leaves,<br class="">Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk, the lilacs bloom in the dooryards,<br class="">The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead.<br class=""><br class="">What chemistry!<br class="">That the winds are really not infectious,<br class="">That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea which is so amorous after me,<br class="">That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues,<br class="">That it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited themselves in it,<br class="">That all is clean forever and forever,<br class="">That the cool drink from the well tastes so good,<br class="">That blackberries are so flavorous and juicy,<br class="">That the fruits of the apple-orchard and the orange-orchard, that melons, grapes, peaches, plums, will<br class=""> none of them poison me,<br class="">That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease,<br class="">Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once a catching disease.<br class=""><br class="">Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,<br class="">It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,<br class="">It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses,<br class="">It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,<br class="">It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,<br class="">It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.</p><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>- Walt Whitman</div></div></div></div></body></html>