A great poet from Idaho once described poetry as "the news that stays news." Everybody already had the big news on Tuesday: A man of color and great intelligence had been elected 44th president of the United States. Yet more than a million people gathered in the cold at the nation's capitol to hear the man and his friends speak, to take part in the rituals of the transfer of presidential office. Barak Obama wrote his own speech. This is the kind of talent that makes a statesman out of a politician.
Cynics will say that the words spoken on Inauguration Day were nothing more than empty rhetoric; that governing is made of deeds, rather than pretty words; that we must quickly get back down to earth and the real news of day-to-day government. But words formed our nation from its very beginning, and are the tools we will use to continue shaping its destiny. Politics is about the distribution of power. Art is about revelation. The news informs us. Poetry transforms us.
We need all the faith and poetry we can get in a democracy. With no kings or corporations to rule us, we need words that will bring us from a field of contest with one another to a new field of consciousness.
The Whitmanesque verse of Elizabeth Alexander's poem, "Praise Song for the Day," celebrated the truest day-to-day workings of a democracy. Her poem celebrated working-class mysteries, rather than dark political objectives based on the economic imperatives of big business:
"Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair. Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice. A woman and her son wait for the bus. A farmer considers the changing sky; a teacher says, 'Take out your pencils. Begin.'"
"We encounter each other in words," she writes. "Words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; words to consider, reconsider."
The president's own words were well considered and conciliatory, but also filled with warning. His first duty as president was to review the troops on the east steps of the Capitol, troops originally mustered to defend a fledgling democracy from attack by kings. His inspired language taps into our deepest feelings of our nation, recalling half-remembered ideals that can unite rather than divide us:
"America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because we the people have remained faithful to the ideals of our forbears, and true to our founding documents. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions, greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction ... We gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord."
Eighty-seven-year-old Rev. Joseph Lowery, a former civil rights worker, added the faith born of great adversity to the inaugural message:
"Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around ... when yellow will be mellow ... when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right. That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen."
As for the new administration, and all of those who support a new beginning in America, it can no longer be merely about winning.
Tony Evans: tevans@mt express.com
