Two Hundred Years

And how I was not palpable once but am now ... and was born

           on the last day of May 1819  .... and passed from a babe

           in the creeping trance of three summers and three winters

           to articulate and walk .... all are equally wonderful.

And that I grew six feet high .... and that I have become a man

           thirty-six years old in 1855 .... and that I am here anyhow ....

           are all equally wonderful;

And that my soul embraces you this hour, and we affect each other

           without ever seeing each other, and never perhaps to see

           each other, is every bit as wonderful.

                                             Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855)