Get your poet on

Oh frabjous day, etc.!  April is National Poetry Month.  This is the twentieth year of the celebration sponsored by the American Academy of Poets.  The Academy has lists of scheduled celebrations (for us, the nearest ones listed are in San Antonio) and 30 Ways to Celebrate National Poetry Month.  One of them is "Teach This Poem," a resource for teachers.  Another is to attend a poetry reading at some local venue.  How fortunate we are to have one of those very occasions coming up at Recycled Reads.  Indeed, RR holds original poetry readings with an open mic on the first Sunday of every month.

In honor of National Poetry Month--and as a result of my ongoing search for humanist literature--I want to share a poem with you.  This is from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (which you can download for free from Project Gutenberg), from Book XX, "By the Roadside."

O Me! O Life!

O me!  O life!  of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities     fill'd with the foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more   foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects   mean, of the struggle ever renew'd,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the   rest me intertwined,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,
That you are here--that life exists and identity,
The question, O me!  so sad, recurring--what good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

It took me a while to untangle this.  Free verse doesn't automatically translate to transparency of meaning.  Sometimes we have to dig for it.  This poem, in my thinking, is wonderfully expressive of our never-ending struggle to find meaning in our comparatively small and short lives in a random universe.  I like the answer.  Do you read it that way?  I see myself in some of these lines, these images.  You may see it differently, but I'd like to hear that difference.

More generally, have you found a secret hoard of humanist/ethical poetry?  Care to share?  Who speaks to our values, our purpose?