Or maybe it’s the very sign of God, a coy reminder of the mystery of creation, dropped everywhere for us to wonder whose it is (like a woman dropping a monogrammed handkerchief in the hope that it will be picked up by a possible lover and will lead him back to her). Maybe, in the way it manages to grow everywhere out of the soil (which is always composted death), the grass is the “flag of my disposition,” the very sign of the poet’s optimism. And the poet, instead of offering a categorical reply (he is done with the lecturing and accounting and the talk of beginnings and endings), responds instead by offering guesses, shifting answers, for he realizes that, the more we think about what the grass truly is, the less we know. As is often the case with children’s questions, there is no easy answer to this one. In this section, a child asks the question that will generate the rest of the poem: “ What is the grass?” The answer to this question will in some ways occupy the poet through all the rest of the sections, leading him eventually to entitle his entire book Leaves of Grass.
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