Inaugural Addresses & Presidential Poetry

We have a new curricula module ready for the historical inauguration of Barack Obama. Inauguration Speeches and Poetry offers activities that can be incorporated into the classroom but the material is for all our readers.

Read selected excerpts from past speeches and all of the poems commissioned to be read at the inauguration of U.S. presidents. The poetry section of the module includes poems written in honor of Obama's presidency by a number of U.S. writers including former U.S. Poet Laureate, Billy Collins.

Here's one from Derek Walcott:

Forty Acres

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.

Voices Education Project

Voices in Wartime