Beauty for a Monday Morning

So now for a week of party planning! Our son Ryan marries Casey on Saturday. Our second wedding of a son in six months. However, the other wedding was in Athens so we were all in a hotel. This time the wedding is about 45 minutes from here and we'll be having company here at our house.
Ryan's groomsmen are mostly staying here Friday night and hanging out at the pool Friday afternoon while the girls are getting their nails done. My folks will also be staying here that night. Then some family and friends from out of state are coming back here Saturday night after the afternoon wedding. Two couples from Indiana and Nebraska are staying through the weekend. These couples are friends from our newlywed days in Jacksonville, FL. What fun to all be together again!
But since I'm busy I thought I'd share one of my favorite poems this morning. After a few days on the Georgia coast and driving through the state, I came home to look it up and read it again. Hope you enjoy it as well.

O Magnet-South by Walt Whitman

O magnet-south! O glistening perfumed South! my South!
O quick mettle, rich blood, impulse and love! good and evil! O all
   dear to me!
O dear to me my birth-things—all moving things and the trees where
   I was born—the grains, plants, rivers,
Dear to me my own slow sluggish rivers where they flow, distant,
   over flats of slivery sands or through swamps,
Dear to me the Roanoke, the Savannah, the Altamahaw, the Pedee, the
   Tombigbee, the Santee, the Coosa and the Sabine,
O pensive, far away wandering, I return with my soul to haunt their
   banks again,
Again in Florida I float on transparent lakes, I float on the
   Okeechobee, I cross the hummock-land or through pleasant openings
   or dense forests,
I see the parrots in the woods, I see the papaw-tree and the
   blossoming titi;
Again, sailing in my coaster on deck, I coast off Georgia, I coast
   up the Carolinas,
I see where the live-oak is growing, I see where the yellow-pine,
   the scented bay-tree, the lemon and orange, the cypress, the
   graceful palmetto,
I pass rude sea-headlands and enter Pamlico sound through an inlet,
   and dart my vision inland;
O the cotton plant! the growing fields of rice, sugar, hemp!
The cactus guarded with thorns, the laurel-tree with large white flowers,
The range afar, the richness and barrenness, the old woods charged
   with mistletoe and trailing moss,
The piney odor and the gloom, the awful natural stillness, (here in
   these dense swamps the freebooter carries his gun, and the
   fugitive has his conceal'd hut;)
O the strange fascination of these half-known half-impassable
   swamps, infested by reptiles, resounding with the bellow of the
   alligator, the sad noises of the night-owl and the wild-cat, and
   the whirr of the rattlesnake,
The mocking-bird, the American mimic, singing all the forenoon,
   singing through the moon-lit night,
The humming-bird, the wild turkey, the raccoon, the opossum;
A Kentucky corn-field, the tall, graceful, long-leav'd corn,
   slender, flapping, bright green, with tassels, with beautiful
   ears each well-sheath'd in its husk;
O my heart! O tender and fierce pangs, I can stand them not, I will depart;
O to be a Virginian where I grew up! O to be a Carolinian!
O longings irrepressible! O I will go back to old Tennessee and
   never wander more.