Blackout Poetry · April 30, 2022

A blackout poem created from a page of Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. The poem is framed by wavy construction paper with a bark-like texture and black wavy shapes in colored pencil.

By DA ’22

What do you see
Who are they you salute, and that one after another salute you?
a great round wonder rolling through the space,
diminute farms, hamlets, ruins, graveyards, jails, factories,
palaces, hovels, huts of barbarians, tents of nomads upon the surface,
the shaded part on one side where the sleepers are sleeping,
and the sunlit part on the other side,
the curious rapid change of the light and shade,
distant lands, as real and near to the inhabitants on them
my land is to me.

plenteous waters,
mountain peaks, I see the sierras of Andes where they range,
plainly on the Himalayas, Chian Shahs, Altays, Ghauts,
the giant pinnacles of Elbruz, Kazbek, Bazardjusi,
the Styrian Alps, and the Karnac Alps,
the Pyrenees, Balks, Carpathians, and to the north the
Dofrafields, and off at sea mount Hecla,
Vesuvius and Etna, the mountains of the Moon, and the
Red mountains of Madagascar,
the Lybian, Arabian, and Asiatic deserts,
huge dreadful Arctic and Antarctic icebergs,
the superior oceans and the inferior ones, the Atlantic and
Pacific, the sea of Mexico, the Brazilian sea, and the sea of Peru,
The waters of the Hindustan, the China sea, and the gulf of Guinea,
The Japan waters, the beautiful bay of Nagasaki land-lock’d in the mountains,
The spread of the Baltic, Caspian, Bothnia, the British shores
and the Bay of Biscay,