Blackout Poetry · May 1, 2022

A page from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. Over the poem is a rough pencil sketch of the head and neck of a person with short curly hair.

By @P1KOH

I belong in Moscow, Cracow, Warsaw, or northward in Christiania or
Stockholm, or in Siberian Irkutsk, or in some street in Iceland,
I descend upon all those cities, and rise from them again.

I see vapors exhaling from unexplored countries,
I see the savage types, the bow and arrow, the poison’d splint, the fetich,
and the obi.
I see African and Asiatic towns,
I see Algiers, Tripoli, Derne, Mogadore, Timbuctoo, Monrovia,
I see the swarms of Pekin, Canton, Benares, Delhi, Calcutta, Tokio,
I see the Kruman in his hut, and the Dahoman and Ashantee-man in
their huts,
I see the Turk smoking opium in Aleppo,
I see the picturesque crowds at the fairs of Khiva and those of Herat,
I see Teheran, I see Muscat and Medina and the intervening sands, see
the caravans toiling onward,
I see Egypt and the Egyptians, I see the pyramids and obelisks.
I look on chisell’d histories, records of conquering kings, dynasties, cut
in slabs of sand-stone, or on granite-blocks,
I see at Memphis mummy-pits containing mummies embalm’d,
swathed in linen cloth, lying there many centuries,
I look on the fall’n Theban, the large-ball’d eyes, the side-drooping
neck, the hands folded across the breast.

I see all the menials of the earth, laboring,
I see all the prisoners in the prisons,
I see the defective human bodies of the earth,
The blind, the deaf and dumb, idiots, hunchbacks, lunatics,
The pirates, thieves, betrayers, murderers, slave-makers of the earth,
The helpless infants, and the helpless old men and women.