Poem Sunday 5

Thinking about Trayvon Martin today, and all of the conversations going on around his death. There is a whole lot to unpack on that, but I want to try and keep Sunday for poems. So, below are two things: a poem by Nikki Giovanni about the vision of Abraham Lincoln, and an excerpt from Abraham Lincoln's second Inaugural Address.

The American Vision of Abraham Lincoln

AT THIS MOMENT

by Nikki Giovanni, Feb 2009

At this moment

Resting in the comfort of the statue

Of the 16th president of the United States

Missing

An equally impressive representation

Of his friend and advisor

Frederick Douglass

We come

On this day

Recalling the difficult and divisive war

We are compelled

With a prayer in the name

Of those captured and enslaved

Who with heart and mind

Cleared the wilderness

Raised crops

Brought forth families

Submitted their souls

Before a merciful and great God

To acknowledge that The Civil War

Was fought not to free the enslaved

For they knew they were free

But to free the nation

From a terrible cancer eating at our hearts

At this moment

In which we are embarrassed

By the Governor of our fifth largest state

Who appoints a man to the United States Senate

To which both he and his minion agree:

The Letter of the Law

Is more important than

The Spirit of the Law

Now

When we are dismayed that the accidental

Governor of the Empire State can find

Just one more reason to rain pain

And rejection on a family that has offered only

Grace and graciousness

After two hundred years

When we rejoice that another son

Of the Midwest has offered himself

His wife and his two precious daughters

To show us a better way

We gather

In recognition and understanding

That today is always and forever today

Allowing us to offer this plea

For light

And truth

And Goodness

Forgiving as we are forgiven

Being neither tempted nor intolerant of those who are

We come

At this moment

To renew and refurbish

The American vision

Of Abraham Lincoln

And, excerpts from Abraham Lincoln's second Inaugural Address:

Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully.....

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

We still have a long way to go.