A poem for Barack Obama from Nobel winner Derek Walcott
Out of the turmoil emerges one emblem, an engraving —
A young Negro at dawn in straw hat and overalls,
An emblem of impossible prophecy, a crowd
Dividing like the furrow which a mule has ploughed,
Parting for their president: a field of snow-flecked cotton
Forty acres wide, of crows with predictable omens
That the young ploughman ignores for his unforgotten
Cotton-haired ancestors, while lined on one branch, is
A tense
Court of bespectacled owls and, on the field's
Receding rim —
A gesticulating scarecrow stamping with rage at him.
The small plough continues on this lined page
Beyond the moaning ground, the lynching tree, the tornado's
Black vengeance,
And the young ploughman feels the change in his veins,
Heart, muscles, tendons,
Till the land lies open like a flag as dawn's sure
Light streaks the field and furrows wait for the sower.
Derek Walcott was born in St. Lucia in 1930. He divides his time between New York and the Caribbean. The West Indies poet, winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature, writes to mark the election of Barack Obama as President.
