Wilson’s Obama Poem
Copyright©2008, by Wilson J. Moses
Obama married black America
The mighty wife
And two precocious little girls
Innocent, elite, dainty
Prettiness comes as naturally to them
As skipping.
But lest we forget
(And this to me is important)
His folk were not from Niger or from Congo
They spoke a Nilotic language
And fought for cattle on Afric’s eastern plains
They did not furnish captives
For the dungeon of Cape Coast Castle
Or dance under the lash
On decks of slave ships
No dreams deferred of forty acres
And a skinny mule
The father he barely knew
Was a Kenyan goatherd
With a Disneyland T-shirt
And a bright American scheme
Leaving on a jet plane
Crossing a continent to gaze on the Pacific
Towards a land where palm trees swayed
And a cute whte girl from Kansas swam within his ken
Doing a hippy love-dance
Mather’s University was Cotton
That seemed within his reach
But beyond, alas, his grasping fingers
The apostate father slipped back
To Africa. Resourceful mom
Moved on to Indonesia
Thus from a global meeting of East and West
A black Irishman with midwestern roots
Offspring of an Atheist/Transcendentalist Union
(Never Catholic. Never Muslim)
Came to Chicago
Where a Dark Madonna with big shoulders
Taught him the black Jeremiad
And becoming African American for the first time
Obama Married black America.
