Idiossincrasia Matinal

Whoever you are, I fear you are walking

the walks of dreams,

I fear those realities are to melt from under your

feet and hands;

Even now, your features, joys, speech, house,

trade, manners, troubles, follies, costume,

crimes, dissipate away from you,

Your true soul and body appear before me,

They stand forth out of affairs—out of commerce,

shops, law, science, work, farms, clothes, the

house, medicine, print, buying, selling, eating,

drinking, suffering, begetting, dying,

They receive these in their places, they find these

or the like of these, eternal, for reasons,

They find themselves eternal, they do not find that

the water and soil tend to endure forever —

and they not endure.

Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you,

that you be my poem.

Walt Whitman, excerto de Poem of You, Whoever You Are

Leaves of Grass no Dia Mundial da Poesia