Edna O’Brien may be best known for her controversial and celebrated novels, but as she told The Daily Beast, shortly after the election of Barack Obama, she “felt compelled to write a poem about this remarkable and unique man.”
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Click here for a transcript of “Watching Obama.”
Watching Obama by Edna O’Brien
2004
You glided on
A swank
With a lava of language,
Prince Hamlet himself in Illinois.
Met your ghosts—raised them.
In belted sackcloth
Chill smiles
A screed if ancient wrongs.
Met the living too
Who feared your witchcraft
And bought daggers
And several sets of masks.
How far you were meant to travel
Cutting through swathes of sky
Losing or gaining an hour
Puzzling the sad and savage things.
Rivers far below
The taupe earth
Signatures of heaped snow.
You emerged each time
Debonair
As though from a game of tennis.
The sad, the savage things.
The Ones who waited on the roadsides
Believing you would come,
Waited
And were plenished.
They were the ones who brought you hence
As you had brought them
In a beautiful, baffling synthesis.
Now you are Home
Brief is the banquet
A Godsent slumber.
Do you dream of heroic boyish deeds
In some vacant lot, long ago
And do you now begin to fold them
Inside that gaudy Gauguin shirt
And bury them
Under bales of blissful snow.
Your tailor has arrived
To measure you for a breastplate
And a yeoman’s greatcoat.
Beyond the tumult
And the fanfare,
Beyond the anointing,
The Quiet room
That some call a cell
Where poets weave epiphanies
To the ranunculus
That resembles the rose:
And to the tree of atrocities.
There monks kneel on stone
And pray for nothingness.
The Chalice
Staring straight at you
Like the sphinx stone-eyed
Saying nothing,
Not even a nod
And weighs a ton.
