A Song of Joys

by Walt WhitmanPublished: 1984Updated:

In winter I take my eel-basket and eel-spear and travel out
on foot on the ice ~ I have a small axe to cut holes in
the ice.

Behold me well-clothed going gayly or returning in the
afternoon, my brood of tough boys accompanying me,

My brood of grown and part-grown boys, who love to be with
no one else so well as they love to be with me,

By day to work with me, and by night to sleep with me.

~ Walt Whitman
from Leaves of Grass

from The NAMBLA Bulletin, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Jan./Feb., 1984), Pg. 6.

This also appears in Poems of Love and Liberation.