Poets Celebrate Obama

In honor of Barack Obama’s inauguration as the 44th president of the United States, I thought it would be appropriate to share a few poems written for the occasion by some of our foremost poets.

First up, a piece by Alice Walker, the brilliant mind behind such books as The Third Life of Grange Copeland and The Color Purple, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize.

The World Has Changed

The World Has Changed:
Wake up & smell
The possibility.
The world
Has changed:
It did not
Change
Without
Your prayers
Without
Your faith
Without
Your determination
To
Believe
In liberation
&
Kindness;
Without
Your
Dancing
Through the years
That
Had
No
Beat.
The world has changed:
It did not
Change
Without
Your
Numbers
Your
Fierce
Love
Of self
&
Cosmos
It did not
Change
Without
Your
Strength.
The world has
Changed:
Wake up!
Give yourself
The gift
Of a new
Day.
The world has changed:
This does not mean
You were never
Hurt.
The world
Has changed:
Rise!
Yes
&
Shine!
Resist the siren
Call
Of
Disbelief.
The world has changed:
Don’t let
Yourself
Remain
Asleep
To
It.

 

Here’s a poem by Billy Collins, Poet Lauretate of the United States from 2001-2003.

Launch

A boat is sliding into the water today
to test the water and the boat
which glides down a grassy bank
the prow touching the wavelets
then another push
and the length of it up and buoyant
the tapered length of it floating
toward the middle on its own
as we watch from the shore
pointing to the heavy clouds coming in
from every side
but now above us only the sun’s golden rafters
and the boat afloat
out there on the bright surface of the water.

 

Finally, Julia Alvarez, the author of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and In the Time of the Butterflies, has written a powerful, untitled poem for this historic event:

The land was never ours, nor we the land’s:
no, not in Selma, with the hose turned on,
nor in the valley picking the alien vines.
Nor was it ours in Watts, Montgomery–
no matter what the frosty poet said.
We heard the crack of whips, the mothers’ moans
in anthems like an undertow of grief.
The land was never ours but we believed
a King’s dream might some day become a deed
to what we did not own, though it owed us.
(Who had the luxury to withhold himself?)
No gift outright for us, we earned this land
with sorrows currency: our hands, our backs,
our Rosas, Martins, Jesses our Baracks.
Today we give our land what we withheld:
the right at last to call itself one nation

 

For more inaugural poetry fabulousness, visit the AP.

 

Story Source  The Associated Press  |  Image Source  CBC

January 20, 2009 | Filed Under Newsies, Poetry, Politics 

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