Read "This Compost" by Walt Whitman online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
1. Something startles me where I thought I was safest; / I withdraw from the still woods I loved; / I will not go now on the pastures to walk; / I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea; / I will not touch my flesh to the earth, as to other flesh, to renew me.
2. O how can the ground not sicken? / How can you be alive, you growths of spring? / How can you furnish health, you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain? / Are they not continually putting distempered corpses in you? / Is not every continent worked over and over with sour dead?