The Mother of All by Walt Whitman — Read

Pensive, on her dead gazing, I heard the Mother of all, / Desperate, on the torn bodies, on the forms covering the battlefields, gazing; / As she called to her earth with mournful voice while she stalked. / "Absorb them well, O my earth! " she cried -- "I charge you, lose not my sons! / lose not an atom; / And you, streams, absorb them well, taking their dear blood; / And you local spots, and you airs that swim above lightly, / And all you essences of soil and growth -- and you, O my rivers' depths; / And you mountain-sides -- and the woods where my dear children's blood, / trickling, reddened; / And you trees, down in your roots, to bequeath to all future trees, / My dead absorb -- my young men's beautiful bodies absorb -- and their precious, / precious, precious blood; / Which, holding in trust for me, faithfully back again give me, many a year hence, / In unseen essence and odour of surface and grass, centuries hence; / In blowing airs from the fields, back again give me my darlings -- give my / immortal heroes; / Exhale me them centuries hence -- breathe me their breath -- let not an atom be lost. / O years and graves! O air and soil! O my dead, an aroma sweet! / Exhale them, perennial, sweet death, years, centuries hence. "