“…Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk undisturbed…”
Walt Whitman
Give me the Splendid, Silent Sun
Reddish House, Cecil Beaton’s home from 1947 until his death in 1980
Daily Archives: February 24, 2015
I Sit and Look Out
Pasolini, Duane Michals, 1969
83
“I SIT and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and shame;
I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men, at anguish with themselves, remorseful after deeds done;
I see, in low life, the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate;
I see the wife misused by her husband—I see the treacherous seducer of young women;
I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love, attempted to be hid—I see these sights on the earth;
I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny—I see martyrs and prisoners;
I observe a famine at sea—I observe the sailors casting lots who shall be kill’d, to preserve the lives of the rest;
I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like;
All these—All the meanness and agony without end, I sitting, look out upon,
See, hear, and am silent.”
Walt Whitman
