Ten minutes to write. Less time to read.

Carl Sandburg once wrote a poem about the power of grass to erase bitter memories of war and death. It isn’t explicit in the poem, but the scene is a cemetery where crosses grow. Newly dug graves with shiny markers remind the visitor of the horrors that occurred either on the very land or nearby. Over time, grass softens the scene with its verdant blanket. Told from the point of view of the grass, the eleven lines of poetry speak volumes. “I am the grass, let me work,” ends Sandburg’s poem.

This morning, I sat musing over coffee in bed while looking out my bedroom window. Because of frequent summer rains, our own lawn is green and full. There is no cemetery in view, but I wondered about the nature of grass as I sipped from my cup.

What if I cut a one inch square of lawn and counted the number of blades it contained? Then if I multiplied that number by the number of square inches in the one acre that our house rests on, I would discover the approximate number of blades of grass in our lawn. I believe it would be an amazing figure.

Cemeteries are much larger than one acre, so if I continued the mathematical progression and multiplied the number of blades in a single acre by the size of the cemeteries at Austerlitz or Waterloo, or of Gettysburg or Verdun, I might get a real sense of what Sandburg meant.

Even without doing this, I know the staying power of grass cannot be denied. If you want to read Sandburg’s poem for yourself, the quickest way is to go to http://www.bartleby.com/134/91.html. Tell Carl I sent you.