Elizabeth Alexander Recalls Her Day at Obama's First Inauguration

Elizabeth Alexander reminisces for the New Yorker about her day as inaugural poet. "This is a story about eight years ago this week," she writes. "President-elect Barack Obama had asked me to compose and recite a poem for his first Inauguration. It was the fourth time in history that a poet would speak at a Presidential inaugural." More:

I was allowed to bring one person to sit onstage with me. My husband insisted that it be my father, who spent his life advocating for racial justice. “People need to look up on that stage and see his white hair,” he said, meaning, in African proverbial fashion, that the first black President would not be possible without the historical struggles of elders and ancestors, a fact that we needed to remember. So my father sat with me, wearing a large button he had saved since the 1963 March on Washington, to which he and my mother took me, in a baby stroller, because sometimes marching is what you are supposed to do. The button had a white hand and a black hand clasping, and read, “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” I held the word “freedom” inside of me on the stage as I waited to read. Freedom. How would we know it? What would it feel like? Who gets to have it? What do we do without it? How do we know inside when we are free? The words of a great poet, Robert Hayden, answered for me, from his sonnet “Frederick Douglass,” in which Douglass’s quest for the freedom of his people is described as “fleshing the dream of the beautiful, needful thing.” I willed my face to un-freeze as we sat and waited for the ceremony to begin. “Don’t look at me, Daddy,” I said, because I knew that the smallest crack of emotion might impair my ability to do my job of delivering the poem.

“I have the distinct pleasure of introducing an American poet,” Senator Dianne Feinstein said, and then she spoke my name. An American poet. I read my poem, feeling American poets alive and dead by my side, feeling myself as representative in the most grave and beautiful way. A black woman whose enslaved ancestors could in theory have been sold in a slave market visible on the Mall from where she read her poem. A poet who walked in the path laid down by old Walt Whitman, who tended injured Civil War soldiers in body and soul on that Mall in its capacity as field hospital. He cared for the dying with medical attention, horehound candy and rice pudding, soothing caresses, and poetry.

A full portrait of this beautiful day at the New Yorker.