After the War by Walt Whitman

To the leavened soil they trod, calling, I sing, for the last; / Not cities, nor man alone, nor war, nor the dead: / But forth from my tent emerging for good -- loosing, untying the tent-ropes; / In the freshness, the forenoon air, in the far-stretching circuits and / vistas, again to peace restored; / To the fiery fields emanative, and the endless vistas beyond -- to the south / and the north; / To the leavened soil of the general Western World, to attest my songs, / To the average earth, the wordless earth, witness of war and peace, / To the Alleghanian hills, and the tireless Mississippi, / To the rocks I, calling, sing, and all the trees in the woods, / To the plain of the poems of heroes, to the prairie spreading wide, / To the far-off sea, and the unseen winds, and the sane impalpable air. / And responding they answer all, (but not in words,) / The average earth, the witness of war and peace, acknowledges mutely; / The prairie draws me close, as the father, to bosom broad, the son: -- / The Northern ice and rain, that began me, nourish me to the end; / But the hot sun of the South is to ripen my songs.