beautiful and uncut

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“A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands,
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he...

“And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
Tenderly will I use you curling grass”


Yesterday's dead nurture today's living. You can only guess just what type of native warm season grass Whitman was thinking of when he wrote the above lines, but I’m sure it wasn’t a wimpy, creeping fescue. Perhaps it was a hardy broom sage—golden, uncut and beautiful.

- From “Leaves of Grass” by Walt Whitman

- Photo taken at Seven Islands Wildlife Refuge

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