Poem In Your Pocket Day

According NPR's The Bryant Park Project, today is Poem in Your Pocket Day. It's one of the many events happening during National Poetry Month. The idea is to select a poem you love, carry it with you (preferably, in your pocket), and share it with other people.

While I'm perfectly capable of the selecting and the carrying, I'm not very good at the sharing, at least not in the face-to-face sense of the word. I just don't possess the courage to read a poem to somebody in person. The fear he or she will think I'm a complete idiot is a bit overwhelming.

Which is why I decided to share my poem here. It's "Bivouac on a Mountain Side" by Walt Whitman (source: Wikisource).

I see before me now a traveling army halting,
Below a fertile valley spread, with barns and the orchards of summer,
Behind, the terraced sides of a mountain, abrupt, in places rising high,
Broken, with rocks, with clinging cedars, with tall shapes dingily seen,
The numerous camp-fires scatter'd near and far, some away up on the mountain,
The shadowy forms of men and horses, looming, large-sized, flickering,
And over all the sky--the sky! far, far out of reach, studded, breaking out, the eternal stars.

And, just in case you were wondering, I actually carried the poem in my pocket. Carrying a handwritten copy made the poem feel more personal. For safekeeping (and posterity), I scanned it.