Tim Phillips

The power to impact just by writing words

The willingness to speak and let your voice heard

Courageous to expose issues that he had saw

Out of humbleness for he knew he was still flawed

He dreamt of a city of love invincible from things of this earth

If he saw life today what would he think we thought had worth

He wrote on change and he sought it

We wanted success so we bought it

We stick with comfortability and how things have been

He stuck with himself and wrote from within

We wrote like England and didn’t seek a change

Then he came along and now free verse is here today

Not only did he uncover a new way of writing

He opened the door to the world and gave people a new way of fighting

People don’t want to listen to what you say, so write it

Never had the courage before, now try it

That door has been opened and no one can close it

Someone needed to be an example and he was the one who showed it

He came from nothing and no one knew who he was

He wrote a few poems and then he was all the buzz

But it wasn’t how much he wrote it was what he was saying

Lines few in number but they saw a multitude of what he was conveying

He showed us a message in a message and that’s what we are blessed with

He showed us free-verse and fought for equality and he was freely restless

He showed us change within change and boldly didn’t hide it

He left it out in the open and yet people still were too blind to find it

From 1819 to 1892 he fought till his last breath drifted away

And on March 30 in Camden, New Jersey, Walt Whitman rolled over freely, in his grave