But it is primarily the sign of life emerging from death, and the poet imagines himself walking over graves and imagining the grass as the transformed life of those buried beneath him. The grass is itself a child, always emerging anew from the realm of death into a new life it is a kind of coded writing that seems to speak equality since it grows among the rich and poor, among black and white. Or maybe itвЂ™s the very sign of God, a coy reminder of the mystery of creation, dropped everywhere for us to wonder whose it is (like a woman dropping a monogrammed handkerchief in the hope that it will be picked up by a possible lover and will lead him back to her).

Maybe, in the way it manages to grow everywhere out of the soil (which is always composted death), the grass is the вЂњflag of my disposition,вЂќ the very sign of the poetвЂ™s optimism. And the poet, instead of offering a categorical reply (he is done with the lecturing and accounting and the talk of beginnings and endings), responds instead by offering guesses, shifting answers, for he realizes that, the more we think about what the grass truly is, the less we know. As is often the case with childrenвЂ™s questions, there is no easy answer to this one. In this section, a child asks the question that will generate the rest of the poem: вЂњ What is the grass?вЂќ The answer to this question will in some ways occupy the poet through all the rest of the sections, leading him eventually to entitle his entire book Leaves of Grass.

All the grass is singing