THIS DAY'S BIRTH (an invocation for Barack Obama)

Through flood… and quaking earth
And winds, those before our grand machinery
Anointed the solemn granite
With our foundation, left great trust in the future
Of their manuscript here
Upon our country's doorstep,
That such swaying of the pillars toward failure
Be remedied in the steadfast parchment.

On this day of days
Let us consider love,
Compassion, freedom, hope.
The sky, ocean, seas, soil,
Home to our limbs and joy
Long misplaced and low,
A glee sunken in our brow
Like the whisper of our end
Bending the corners of our mouths

Misplaced in the shadow of sand and war.
Let this day be remarkable with its coming,
Daring our better selves to stand upon
The shoulders of history and predict our future
With its smiling on the children of peace

In one long, joy filled stride.
We have but to embrace ourselves; the wish
We formed at this day’s birth
Beneath the sun, reaching down to us, above
The staining of men in trenches
Whose lives wait in favor of ours.
Holding for a rise from ashes,
To cleanse this; our foul-bred hunger.
Equipped with mercy

And kindness
The prayer need rise out of us, but no further
Than we might travel among the poor.

No further than the broken,
The weary, hunkered down, begging
Of our hands to fetch them up.

All of us, our strength, a sturdy column
Unbent by the weight of courage,
Tempests in the empty halls of power,
Rumbling a refrain of unity
As we break open the shackles of misuse
Long left to fester on the people’s steps,
Find that this dawn is upon our shoulders,
It is we, who now negotiate with our own death,
Our girth of indifference.

Rise now to greet this day,
Our moment elevated from spirit,
Breathing, throbbing, ready,
Not for one, not for country,
But for love.

Use it for more than our self-seeking,
Use it as if it were the breath of mercy kneeling down.
Indulge its hunger, it has been waiting so long,
Hunkered down, bound and bleeding, ready
For our rising shoulders to hoist it tall again.

© 2008 mrp/thepoetryman

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DEAR POET, WHEN I THINK OF...

Elizabeth Alexander to Read Poem at Obama's Inauguration

Elizabeth Alexander is a poet, essayist, playwright, and teacher. She is the author of four books of poems, The Venus Hottentot, Body of Life, Antebellum Dream Book, and American Sublime, which was one of three finalists for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. She is also a scholar of African-American literature and culture and recently published a collection of essays, The Black Interior. She has read her work across the U.S. and in Europe, the Caribbean, and South America, and her poetry, short stories, and critical prose have been published in dozens of periodicals and anthologies. She has received many grants and honors, most recently the Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellowship for work that “contributes to improving race relations in American society and furthers the broad social goals of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954,” and the 2007 Jackson Prize for Poetry, awarded by Poets and Writers. She is a professor at Yale University, and for the academic year 2007-2008 she is a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

"SLAVE" by Pawel Kuczynski

...when I think of the soldiers packing gear,
Their guns silent, tanks still, standing at the ready,
Eyes moist with liberation and grief, hands wrung their last,
I think of them gleaming, striding away from the savagery,
The dying, the defeated, the triumphant... colorless stench.

When I see them marching out, freed of the difficult sand,
I imagine that black soldiers are most anxious for home,
Calling for the stretch of time to witness their history,
Onlooker to human hope instead of war’s gangling limbs
Stacked like firewood on streets smothered in suffering.

When I think of all of the soldiers coming home
Shipped in those god-awful frowning boxes,
I try to imagine their loved and beautiful faces,
But their smiles float away from who they were.
What a sad and ghastly testament of their use.

Dear Poet,
May your use, your words paint upon this,
Grant us reprieve from an unfavorable history.
Free our hearts and our minds of horrid combat
For war is the chain that has enslaved us all.

© 2008 mrp/tpm

Elizabeth Alexander Home Page