Lyrics

Heart of the Stranger

Thomas Haley came to America
To fight for Lincoln in ‘63
And his letter home to Kerry said he’d enlisted
Company M 4th New York Cavalry

Then in the fighting in Virginia
He took a bullet through his lung
And they sent him off to do his dying
In the hospital tents of Washington

Chorus
Walt Whitman came to sit by his bedside
Day after day as Thomas Haley died
Little he knew, poor death-stricken boy,
The heart of the stranger that hovered near

Between the deliriums of the drugs and the pain
Haley could never raise a word
But his eyes spoke the frightened poem of his dying
And the eyes of the poet heard

Whitman looked down on his handsome face
His athlete’s body his shining hair
And he, too, was held in a silence
Before the passing of something so good and so fair

Chorus

(Bridge: Whitman’s “Reconciliation”)

Word over all, beautiful as the sky!
Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be
utterly lost;
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, incessantly softly wash
again, and ever again, this soil'd world:

... For my enemy is dead--a man divine as myself is dead;
I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin--I draw near;
I bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.

Then one day Haley woke and he turned his head
Gave Whitman one long clear steady gaze
As if he saw the moment of his going
And then, too, the sign of something that stays

The next day the boy’s cot was empty
And Whitman made his rounds, not one did he miss
His hand impassive but his breast on fire
And on his lips many a soldier’s kiss

Chorus