Three Memorial Day Poems

Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman’s birthday is today, and I feel called upon to share with you “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” one of the greatest poems in the American language, and one of the most uncanny. In the sense of providing us with the ability to listen to the dead (or to the living spirit that may come to us from the dead), it resonates with Memorial Day. In the line "Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood yet was hurried," I feel myself leaning on the rail, with Walt speaking directly to me.

How wondrous strange that Memorial Day coincides with Whitman’s birthday!

I would also like to offer you my own Memorial Day poem, “The Poetics Lesson,” first published in the Alabama Literary Review and subsequently in In Praise of Manhattan. Here too, the voices from the dead come alive, this time more specifically from the war dead given voice by the poet John McCrae. His “In Flanders Fields,” was the first poem I ever truly appreciated, meaning that it was the first poem I ever loved.

Photo credit: "Walt Whitman" by Marion Doss is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.