#grave

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. I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt, Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose? Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation. Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic, And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones, Growing among black folks as among white, Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same. And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves. Tenderly will I use you curling grass, It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men, It may be if I had known them I would have loved them, It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers' laps, And here you are the mothers' laps. This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers, Darker than the colorless beards of old men, Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths. O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues, And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing. ... What do you think has become of the young and old men? And what do you think has become of the women and children? They are alive and well somewhere, The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceas'd the moment life appear'd. All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier. ↗

— Walt Whitman

#grass #graves #life #beauty

I never understood why when you died, you didn't just vanish, everything should just keep going on the way it was only you just wouldn't be there. I always thought I'd like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, I'd like it to say 'figment'. ↗

— Andy Warhol

#epitaph #grave #heaven #hell #life

You called her Kitten? And she let you? She put me in a coma for three days when I called her that! My balls never recovered from her smashing them into my spine! ↗

— Jeaniene Frost

#cat #foot #grave #juan #kitten

They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more. ↗

— Samuel Beckett

#birth #give #gleams #grave #instant

I went across the fields to avoid the straight highways, along the firing lines where people were shooting at a small wooded hill, which is now covered with wooden crosses and lines of graves instead of spring flowers. ↗

— Max Beckmann

#along #avoid #covered #crosses #fields

You have come into a hard world. I know of only one easy place in it, and that is the grave. ↗

— Henry Ward Beecher

#easy #grave #hard #i #into

It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified. ↗

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

#anything #because #dignified #down #else

I missed you every minute this week and I don't want to spend another day without you. If my mom disowns me for being with a vampire, then that's her decision, but I've made mine, and I won't apologize of back down from it. ↗

— Jeaniene Frost

#grave #halfway #decisions

He is an old bore. Even the grave yawns for him. ↗

— Herbert Beerbohm Tree

#even #grave #him #old

Nowadays, many Americans have forgotten the meaning and traditions of Memorial Day. At cemeteries across the country, the graves of the fallen are sadly ignored, and worse, neglected. ↗

— Allen West

#cemeteries #country #day #fallen #forgotten