A few leaves.

Thank goodness for the newspapers...I was at a loss (seems to be a real dilemma lately) of what to make and I came across an article about a researcher, who, while going through Civil War documents, found nearly 3,000 letters and papers written by Walt Whitman.  Whitman was a clerk for the attorney general long before he wrote Leaves of Grass at age 40.  The papers aren't poems, they are simply legal documents that he transcribed, but they give insight on his views at the time.  The article described an interesting guy;  at one point he was dismissed for his clerk job at the Bureau of Indian Affairs because Interior Secretary James Harlan deemed his poetry immoral, and he visited tens of thousands of wounded and sick soldiers during the war, writing poetry all the while.