Week 33: 'A child said What is the grass?'

Wonder spawned: Today!
Wondered into being by: You, with help from Walt Whitman.
Wonderspan: 2 min reading + 8 min writing
To experience this wonder at its best: Don't make plans for lunch today just yet.

This Monday's morning wonder is dedicated to Jonathan B, who turns 40 today and can still meet the world with the spark of a wonderstruck child.

The lawns, playing fields and parks reek of green this week as they get a haircut from the council's mowers.  Today's way of loving will be made by you, wonder-lovers.  This is your mission, should you choose to accept it.

'A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands'

So reads a line of Walt Whitman's long poem, Leaves of Grass.  Your mission is to spend about 10 minutes this lunchtime answering this child laden with grass and a question.  So, what is the grass?  Walt Whitman begins his own answer by suggesting that grass might be:

'...the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven'

Grass is a flag waving in the breeze, lain out across a hillside perhaps, or between two council blocks with a duet of council tractors do-si-do-ing across it.  In a moment of Whitman's imagination, hope looks and smells like grass.

If you’re game for this, spend a few minutes jotting down five metaphors for grass and include them in a comment (anonymously if you like) at the foot of this blog entry.  I will do this too – even if no-one else does!  In any case, if you have nothing much planned for lunch, why not give it a go?  It's just a few minutes from the day, after all.  Even if you spend the first five minutes doing nothing, which can feel like a lot of just sitting still, you'll probably spend the other five surprising yourself.

(Stuck?  I suggest you don't try to be poetical - that way lies anguish and despair!  Just try to notice the qualities of grass - the way it looks, smells, grows, the way it's lots of little spiky bits up-close and a large smooth expanse from a distance.  Then think about what else from life has that same quality... That's what grass 'is'.)

Here's the excerpt from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, 1855 (first edition):

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
  How could I answer the child? . . . . I do not know what it is any more than he.

  I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green
      stuff woven.

  Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
  A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
  Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see
      and remark, and say Whose?

  Or I guess the grass is itself a child . . . . the produced babe of the vegetation.

  Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
  And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
  Growing among black folks as among white,
  Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I
      receive them the same.

  And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

  Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
  It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
  It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,
  It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out
      of their mothers' laps,
  And here you are the mothers' laps.

  This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
  Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
  Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

  O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
  And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.

With thanks to Julia Casterton for getting her poetry group (my very first class) to try this out.  Julia had been ill for some time and died just a few months after the class.  She was a superb teacher and helped many people including me to start their journey in poetry.

___________________
www.waysofloving.com