Good evening. Welcome to Dk Poetry Slam/Open Mic! Thank you for coming! Pick out a table or sit on
the floor, come up to the mic & speak your piece.
There's a big, bright full moon tonight & election day is carreening toward us, so let us "Howl" together one more time, for the big Kahuna, the GOTV tsunami, & the Dem resurgence. There's a bad moon rising for Repubs.
Aurwoooooo!
Feel free to post poems, play scenes and short short stories. Your own work or
the works of others.
In the spirit of the first Tuesday of November in America, I'll open with a poem by
Walt Whitman
Election Day, November 1884
from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (1892)
If I should need to name, O Western World, your powerfulest scene and show,
'Twould not be you, Niagara--nor you, ye limitless prairies--nor your huge
rifts of canyons, Colorado,
Nor you, Yosemite--nor Yellowstone, with all its spasmic geyserloops ascending
to the skies, appearing and disappearing,
Nor Oregon's white cones--nor Huron's belt of mighty lakes--nor
Mississippi's stream:
--This seething hemisphere's humanity, as now, I'd name--the still small
voice vibrating--America's choosing day,
(The heart of it not in the chosen--the act itself the main, the quadrennial
choosing,)
The stretch of North and South arous'd-sea-board and inland-Texas to
Maine--the Prairie States--Vermont, Virginia, California,
The final ballot-shower from East to West--the paradox and conflict,
The countless snow-flakes falling--(a swordless conflict,
Yet more than all Rome's wars of old, or modern Napoleon's:) the peaceful
choice of all,
Or good or ill humanity--welcoming the darker odds, the dross:
--Foams and ferments the wine? it serves to purify--while the heart pants,
life glows:
These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships,
Swell'd Washington's, Jefferson's, Lincoln's sails.