Nobel Prize winning poet Derek Walcott wrote this beautiful poem for Barack Obama. (Maybe he should have called it "44 Acres.")
40 Acres
by 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.
3 comments:
No it should not be 44 Acres. Read about 40 Acres And A Mule in American history, and you'd understand exactly what he's talking about.
That was my attempt at a joke because Obama will be the 44th president.
Actually, that's quite funny! Why didn't I get that at first---Glad you explained! You can start a 44 Acre and a Mule joke. Well, maybe not. I've had my share of those text message jokes.
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