This is particularly apropos of the era of the coronavirus:
Excerpts from “Poem of Wonder at the Resurrection of the Wheat" by Walt Whitman, one of the great Civil War poets

"How can the ground not sicken of men?
How can you be alive, you growths of spring?
How can you furnish health, you blood of herbs,
roots, orchards, grain?
Are they not continually putting distempered
corpses in the earth?
Is not every continent worked over and over with
sour dead?
Where have you disposed of those carcasses of
the drunkards and gluttons of so many gen-
erations?


That all is clean, forever and forever!
That the cool drink from the well tastes so good!
That blackberries are so flavorous and juicy!
That the fruits of the apple-orchard, and of the
orange-orchard—that melons, grapes, peaches,
plums, will none of them poison me!
That when I recline on the grass I do not catch
any disease!
Though probably every spear of grass rises out
of what was once a catching disease.

Now I am terrified at the earth! it is that calm
and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseased corpses,
It distils such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks, its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men . . . "

We’ll get through this.