“Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As for me, I know of nothing else but miracles.
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car.”
--Walt Whitman.
If man or woman be at all sensitive to life, he must react to the
commonplace much as Whitman did. Such a person may be hurrying along
about his business with perhaps no time for reflection and yet in
a flash, the miracle of life will come to him through the slightest
happening.
A little girl on the ferry sitting with her mother takes from her small
prim bag a set of doll clothes, and fondles them and smoothes them
much like a pullet with her first chickens. The sight of those square,
little, gingham dresses, trimmed with scraps of lace and silk and with
awkward sleeves standing straight out, brought to me, on that Oakland
ferry, all my childhood again, and I was cuddled close between the
surface roots of a great elm and from the nearby lane came the sight and
scent of Bouncing Bet, Joe Pye Weed, Tansy, Yarrow, Golden Rod, Boneset,
and over in the meadow the sight of cows and the smell of peppermint and
water cress, beside a little stream.
The moment I write it down in physical words it becomes somehow less
miraculous. The mind is so infinite and the human being so essentially
mental, that the spoken or written word may never express them.
The sight of electric lights flashing at night, the view of the city
from a cable car, the wonder of great trucks bearing down upon us like
fiery-eyed dragons, a bunch of poppies growing close to the roots of a
billboard in the heart of the city, and the silhouette of a young girl,
wind-blown, so that her straight slender figure shows more beautiful
than the statue that tops Union Square. Up Kearny street the glimpse of
eucalyptus trees on the top of Telegraph Hill standing out against the
pink sunset sky, the postman with his pack of human messages on his
back, the spirit of Robert Louis Stevenson in Portsmouth Square, and a
row of old, old men sitting in the sun on Union Square discussing the
Universe.
Did you ever stand listening to the seals just at nightfall, and did
their weird, low call stir you to a feeling of kinship with all the
creatures of the great deep, and did you lose yourself there out under
the cold, dark water in that mysterious untamed world of the sea that is
older than the land?
I don’t know what it’s all about. I only know we need more poets. Still
every man who reacts to life and feels it to be a miracle, he is himself
a poet. Even Whitman could only articulate in terms of wonder.