Happy Birthday!

May 31st is a good day for a birthday. If today is your birthday, you are in good company!

Born on this day:

1819 Walt Whitman
1898 Norman Vincent Peale
1908 Don Ameche
1930 Clint Eastwood
1938 Peter Yarrow
1941 Johnny Paycheck
1943 Sharon Glass
1943 Joe Namath
1948 John Bonham
1965 Brooke Shields

I Saw In Louisiana A Live Oak Growing
by Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,
All alone stood it, and the moss hung down from the branches;
Without any companion it grew there, uttering joyous leaves of dark green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself;
But I wonder'd how it could utter joyous leaves, standing alone there, without its friend, its lover near--for I knew I could not;
And broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it, and twined around it a little moss,
And brought it away--and I have placed it in sight in my room;
It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends,
(For I believe lately I think of little else than them:)
Yet it remains to me a curious token--it makes me think of manly love;
For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana, solitary, in a wide flat space,
Uttering joyous leaves all its life, without a friend, a lover, near,
I know very well I could not.

Dick Mac Recommends:

The Complete Poems
Walt Whitman