Hail to the chief

A bran new dae ...


I cried with joy today. Thank you American voters. Now the world has a chance to live. I think today means that much. Quite apart from the searing journey of a nation forged in blackbirding, civil war and a black vote won 40 years back - pretty similar to in Australia when we decided our original inhabitants, around 60,000 years of environmentally sound prior habitation notwithstanding, were actually citizens who could be counted and vote. Just for a start. And there's a long, long road we'll travel, but ...

This is a new world.

From Times Online
November 5, 2008
Forty Acres: a poem for Barack Obama from Nobel winner Derek Walcott
The West Indies poet Derek Walcott, winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature, writes exclusively for The Times to mark the election of Barack Obama as President
Derek Walcott Nobel prize winning West Indian poet

Derek Walcott was born in St. Lucia in 1930. He divides his time between New York and the Caribbean


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.