A Poem for Barack

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.”

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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.