Here Comes Walt

A SONG OF JOYS



O to make the most jubilant song!
Full of music--full of manhood, womanhood, infancy!
Full of common employments--full of grain and trees.

O for the voices of animals--O for the swiftness and balance of the fishes!
O for the dropping of raindrops in a song!
O for the sunshine and motion of waves in a song!

O the joy of my spirit--it is uncaged--it darts like lightning!
It is not enough to have this globe or a certain time,
I will have thousands of globes and all time.

O the engineer's joys! to go with the locomotive!
To hear the hiss of steam, the merry shriek, the steam whistle, the
laughing locomotive!
To push with resistless way and speed off in the distance.


O the gleesome saunter over fields and hillsides!
The leaves and flowers of the commonest weed, the moist fresh
stillness for the woods,
The exquisite smell of the earth at daybreak, and all through the
forenoon...

O the joy of that vast elemental sympathy which only the human soul
is capable of generating and emitting in steady and limitless
floods.

O the mother's joys!
The watching, the endurance, the precious love, the anguish, the
patiently yielded life...

-Walt Whitman

Walt Warner is due to arrive on February 20, 2010. I've tried to think of a middle name, but I think we will leave it and hope he comes full of poetry. It turns out that the worries of last week were unfounded as his measurements were all in the normal range, and we learned that my Dr. actually misread the results of the screening. My blood test came back slightly better than normal for my age group. They are having me come back in four weeks, because they are worried about a couple of other things. I am done worrying. As soon as I saw the little face (in 3D, no less) the worry walked out of my body, down the hall and around some unknown corner. Walt looks exactly like his brother Atticus and if he is delivered to me whole without blemish or full of unforeseen problems my love is in place to greet him.

Now I am thinking of the color green, something rich and growing. Maybe I'll even attempt stenciling the large tree I bought several years ago. I like the idea of a tree in the nursery. Yarn is also nesting in my thoughts, blankets, tiny pants and hats, soft, warm. Exactly when these thoughts will become realized is a mystery since Zola, Abe and Atticus give me little time to act on anything but their requests and I have the constant urge to nap. Still...things are beginning to stir.