Monday Poems: "The Second Inaugural" -- by Barbara Claire Freeman

Dear Necessity, the magnitude

            and difficulty of the trust to which the voice

                        of my country has called arises from the recent

tempest, adopted by the Spanish to name

            the storms they encountered in New Times

                        Roman. These reflections, bracketed

by floods, have forced themselves

            so strongly on my mind that I fear

                        Hurakan, who commands winds

from the east. In the night there is a coming

            and going of people, but where are the former

                        ties? Although the wounds of many

of you have begun to fester,

            there are none under the waters, there are

                        none. In this conflict all I dare aver

is that it has been my faithful study

            to collect a duty from a just appreciation

                        of every street lamp in Philadelphia. If I

have violated willingly or silently

            the injunction thereof, I may

                        (besides incurring constitutional punishment) be subject

            to the upbraiding of all who are now

                        witnesses of this present solemnity. I did

not say, “In this chapter begins your future, it cannot be put out by fire.”

*     *     *     *     *

Barbara Claire Freeman is a literary critic, literature professor and poet whose work includes The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women’s Fiction (1998), among other works of literary theory and criticism, and the poetry collection Incivilities (2009). Her poems have won the Boston Review/Discovery Prize and the Language Exchange Prize. 

She teaches creative writing in the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley.