Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama's First 100 Days

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STARTING TODAY 100 POEMS FOR OBAMA'S FIRST 100 DAYS

University of Iowa Press

Chapter One

Coming to a theatre near you, an outrageous congruity. Coming to that theatre, an unprecedented logic. Coming soon, endpoints. Soon to come, time frames.

The sun is rising over rising water, over the desert's drying, over the dead and the dying. The sun is rising; let it inflame us.

AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL

Overwinter 4 day

We have been waiting out the winter for eight years. I don't pretend to talk for you or my neighbors- but I have been given permission to speak on behalf of mollusks, insects, and various wily birds. This is the price and the pleasure of a new president: those who were hushed now feel like they can finally chatter and natter- flex wing and leg freely. The clutch of snails on the fence post near my house can finally unclench retreat to damp underboards of the tool shed. And I have it on good authority at least one spicebush and three swallowtails have promised to arrive a few weeks earlier from their Southern holiday. Those who overwintered have returned. Those who fell asleep are awake. I myself risk it all: I climb to the top of a blade of grass the aperture of my wingshell opens and closes and opens again.

FANNY HOWE Imagine All the People 5 day Imagine being unable to imagine another side. What would you be? A hill so steep you'd throw your thoughts against it? Segregated schools? A decider who never had to fight? Without advance imagination the people perish. Would you be a grandmother who keeps hands warm no matter where they're from? Or would you be a moth-like hat on the head of a singer lifting her higher and higher? Would you be a newspaper soldier, easy to burn? Would you choose to be something you can never change? Or would you hold up your arms during the metamorphosis?

YVETTE THOMAS Missing Metaphor for time 6 day Our last winter was furious. In the gray and yellow dawns we cowered we covered our heads. World buckled at the margins redrawn and drawn close we shook. No fruit fell. Hope is wind chimes and wind. Change is

PATRICIA SMITH Man, roll the Window down! 7 day On a slushed side street in the Bronx, a determined hustler attacks your smudged windshield with enterprise, sloshes the pane with old water and rocks a feverish squeegee before you can mouth the word no. Stunned at a sluggish stoplight, you have no choice but to force a smile, nod idly while he stretches the busy machine of his body across your hood and whips the gritty wet round and around. It's a second before you notice that his mouth is moving, that although he leapt to his task without warning, he is now attempting to converse as men do, to pass the time, to shoot the shit. You avoid the mouth, choosing instead to scan the dank street for anything. There is lots to see- stands tiled with cheap neon skullcaps, shuttered houses of praise, the fragrant entrance to Chicken, Ribs & Such, a city-assed woman drilling her stilettos into concrete, the butcher shop with price tags pinned to sick meat. In other words, there is nothing to see. He's still draped across your Corolla, wiping, squeaking dry and mouthing. Damned insistent now, he thumps on your windshield and the light has changed now and behind you drivers toot elegant fuck yous. You scramble for your wallet because damn it, that's right, hell, you gotta pay the guy for the gray crisscross swiping that dims the chaos just enough. But what's the message of that mouth, he needs you to know something, inside the huge O of his wild miming there's a collision of collapsed teeth and you slide your window down to a symphony of horn and mad street spittle, and your hustler's message, what he had to get across before he let you pull away from that street light, Obama! Obama! Obama! Obama! he spurt screeches, his eyes fevered with whiskey and damn-it-all, no verbs or adornment, just Obama! as if his wiping little life is stuck on triumph, as if that's all anybody needs to know this day and as he leans in to roar his one-word stanza, damn the money, you see that every single one of those teeth, tilted and pushing for real estate in his mouth, every single one of them is a gold like you've never seen before.

LYN LIFSHIN Michelle's Citrine dress 8 days color of where something growing starts. Spring. Clean and new. The place where a stem jolts up from what nourished and fed it. I think of tulips when I think of that dress, what's alive and sunny, sparkling and nothing like the yellow tulips I sent for what I knew could be a dying friend's dying day

SASHA STEENSEN Wintry Weather and Job Slaughter 9 days All our tales are tall: one week after the inauguration, the lost n in auger bores its hole in the frozen ground. Daily life is holy bedeviling. Who but a witness tree knew the axe is an American native? First thing today, I had my blood drawn. In the distant waiting room, we have to start by listening, the president says. To what? To what's been lost. Octuplets born today- that many more platelets to count, that many more ears to open, mouths to shut, jobs to lose, snows to shovel. All emotion that matters securely hidden buried in a bed of heartsease, fog and grown-over ferns the terrific green, still frozen, still freezing which doesn't mean hope isn't eight times hotter this time of year just eight times over and melting what? fear?

My young saplings and their hatchlings.

JOHN PAUL O'CONNOR new time old time 10 days The unchosen have always been the starbeams for the poor, the tortured and beaten, the homeless, the suffocated. They have been the wind that bursts open poppies in an endless field, just as this morning the January wind blew the seeds of this poem jotted down with coffee 3 days before my daughter's 39th birthday. She is, at this moment, in a classroom downtown studying nursing, while her daughter, my little Izzie, sits at Wanda's Daycare spilling blocks onto the carpet with no awareness of the children's blood spilling in Congo while fathers' heads are crushed like brittle stone and mothers' bodies are torn open by monstrous attackers, children they, all written off as lost Africa, which will remain lost for the next 100 days as it has for the past 300 years. It's a tell of people my age when you hear us say, I've seen this before, Camelot and the revolution just around the corner. Today my around the corner is the Fine Fare, where I pick up milk, orange juice, and peanut butter for my girls before getting back to work. I'm lucky to have work, I've heard a dozen people tell me in the past week. The Dominican check-out girls have no union, though surely they thirst for something greater. I can't know. I don't speak their language. I am one of those who has sat at the bar with his whiskey, whispering to himself on an unchosen night, I was born too late, thinking I might have liked to have lived through the Depression and now it looks as if I will get my wish. But will I get my FDR? No I will get my Obama, the first president to have a name that begins with O. O, Obama, be not the chosen, but the unchosen of the unchosen revolution, not around the corner but here on St. Nicholas Avenue where the swollen tribes of unchosen are chanting, Africa come home, and raising their sunbroad arms to demand you be what they believe you are.

LESLÉA NEWMAN Prayer for a President 11 day At the first ball on the first night the first black president and the first lady danced the first dance while Beyoncé sang "At Last." At last this day had come At last this day had ended At last he held her in his arms and they were spinning around the dance floor elegant as the earth spinning around the sun And just for a moment she was just a woman in a fancy white dress dancing with her husband and just for a moment he was just a man in a crisp black tuxedo dancing with his wife and I was just one more American sitting in front of my TV wishing this first day and night could last forever as I danced myself up to bed, the prayer I'd been murmuring since morning spinning around my head: keep them safe keep them safe keep them safe

REBECCA WOLFF The Most Famous Man in the World 12 days Are you like me jug ears of purpose defined positively by your positive action and the clear vision toward a common sense? It's just common sense. I feel you. You feel me. At least one other in this whole world famous to make ready in the event.

MATTHEW ZAPRUDER

Sad news 13 days We have some sad news this morning from Mars. But I'm thinking about lions. Someone said something salient and my head became a light bulb full of power exactly the shape of my head. Sinister thoughts at the Xerox machine. A chat with a retired torturer. Now the sharp blade. Apparently some solar wind pushed a few specklets of actually not red but gray Mars dust through the seal into the vacuum where the very tiny oiled hydraulics of the light from the distant future collector seized. What was it my brother said to me once? Like a vampire bat on a unicorn Change rides every moment. Houston is full of dead elephants and empty labs experimenting on silence, open any mouth and out blows some hope in a binary data stream.

CORNELIUS EADY Praise for the Inaugural Poet, January, 2009 14 day Perhaps it's an impossible task On an impossible day. A young poet Fixes her gaze along the plaza, Looks this latest version of America in the eyes, Looks in the camera at all the places we've touched Or torched. Sees who's come to this roll call: The out of the woodworks, the I never even dreamts, The I never thought I'd live this longs. Stands in the sharp report of weak January sun. The poet probably knows This family is hers. The poet probably knows Before she cuts history to forty-three lines, Before the capitol has more proof Of what bullets and ropes couldn't stop, She has to straighten her back. She needs to take A deep breath. A black woman is here. All the black women in her are here to sing.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from STARTING TODAY 100 POEMS FOR OBAMA'S FIRST 100 DAYS Copyright © 2010 by University of Iowa Press. Excerpted by permission.
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