"Walt Whitman in 1989"

Although the official "Walt Whitman 200" celebration is over, his bicentennial year is just getting started.  With that in mind, I wanted to share the following tribute to that great poet.

While researching the LGBTQ composers whose works I'll be playing in my June 23 recital, I came across a moving Perry Brass poem, the concluding movement of "All the Way Through Evening," Chris DeBlasio's 1990 song-cycle for baritone and piano (later orchestrated).  The piece is available on several different recordings, but the one I have is titled "And Trouble Came: Musical Responses to AIDS." (I've reproduced the poem below as it appears in the liner notes, with its somewhat idiosyncratic layout, capitalization and punctuation.)

Walt Whitman in 1989

Walt Whitman has come down
today to the hospital room;
he rocks back and forth in the crisis;

he says it's good we haven't lost 
our closeness, and cries 
as each one is taken.

He has written many lines
about these years: the disfigurement
of young men and the wars

of hard tongues and closed minds.
The body in pain will bear such nobility,
but words have the edge

of poison when spoken bitterly.
Now he takes a dying man
in his arms and tells him

how deeply flows the River
that takes the old man and his friends
this evening. It is the River

of dusk and lamentation.
"Flow," Walt says, "dear River,
I will carry this young man

to your bank. I'll put him myself
on one of your strong, flat boats,
and we'll sail together all the way 
through evening."

—Feb. 28, 1989, Orangeburg, N.Y.
Perry Brass

Three decades on, this poem has lost none of its power.