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01/20/09 - (1)
Bound Up
This Inauguration Day — Falling just after the Martin Luther King holiday — Belongs, monumentally, to Barack H. Obama, America's forty-fourth president. The sea between January 19 and 20 runs four centuries deep.
At 12 noon, this Tuesday, The Constitution mandated that Illinois's junior senator Become the United States' newest Commander in Chief — An African-American, a person of color, a black man, Who, fifty years past, would have been "boy," "coon," "nigger."
The eyes of the country keep asking themselves, How could this miraculous sea change have come to pass — The depravity of the whiplash, across history's back, And the lynching rope, around its neck, Abolished by the mere thirty-five words of an oath?
Especially when one considers that, just four generations ago, Half the population of this nation Waged war against the better angels of its nature, To ensure that slavery would never perish from the earth Or, if so, only over Jim Crow's rotting dead body.
Something wondrous, glorious, majestic Must account for the millions who flooded Washington's Mall And those who huddled around glowing TV's, Wanting to feel a connection with greatness, be in that number Bound up in the momentary oneness of promise, hope.
01/20/09 - (1)
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