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        HOMEPAGE

        A Poem for Barack

        Acclaimed novelist and poet Edna O’Brien reads an original poem about the inauguration, “Watching Obama.”

        Edna O’Brien

        Updated Apr. 25, 2017 4:15PM ET / Published Jan. 17, 2009 2:10AM ET 

        Charles Rex Arbogast / AP Photo

        Edna O’Brien may be best known for her controversial and celebrated novels, but as she told The Daily Beast, shortly after the election of Barack Obama, she “felt compelled to write a poem about this remarkable and unique man.”

        Click Below to View Video

        Click here for a transcript of “Watching Obama.”

        Watching Obama by Edna O’Brien

        2004

        You glided on

        A swank

        With a lava of language,

        Prince Hamlet himself in Illinois.

        Met your ghosts—raised them.

        In belted sackcloth

        Chill smiles

        A screed if ancient wrongs.

        Met the living too

        Who feared your witchcraft

        And bought daggers

        And several sets of masks.

        How far you were meant to travel

        Cutting through swathes of sky

        Losing or gaining an hour

        Puzzling the sad and savage things.

        Rivers far below

        The taupe earth

        Signatures of heaped snow.

        You emerged each time

        Debonair

        As though from a game of tennis.

        The sad, the savage things.

        The Ones who waited on the roadsides

        Believing you would come,

        Waited

        And were plenished.

        They were the ones who brought you hence

        As you had brought them

        In a beautiful, baffling synthesis.

        Now you are Home

        Brief is the banquet

        A Godsent slumber.

        Do you dream of heroic boyish deeds

        In some vacant lot, long ago

        And do you now begin to fold them

        Inside that gaudy Gauguin shirt

        And bury them

        Under bales of blissful snow.

        Your tailor has arrived

        To measure you for a breastplate

        And a yeoman’s greatcoat.

        Beyond the tumult

        And the fanfare,

        Beyond the anointing,

        The Quiet room

        That some call a cell

        Where poets weave epiphanies

        To the ranunculus

        That resembles the rose:

        And to the tree of atrocities.

        There monks kneel on stone

        And pray for nothingness.

        The Chalice

        Staring straight at you

        Like the sphinx stone-eyed

        Saying nothing,

        Not even a nod

        And weighs a ton.

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