Walt Whitman

1819–1892

Reconciliation

Word over all, beautiful as the sky!

Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost;

That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, incessantly softly wash again,

      and ever again, this soil’d world:

For my enemy is dead — a man divine as myself is dead;

I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin — I draw near;

I bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.