The Day After The Inauguration Poem by Vincent Pozon

As with all things mighty, this started small,
negligible, a shade of blue infected
the horizon in slow, no, sluggish motion,
something large happened on the other side
of the world, and the blue bled from behind
the skyline, the day that comes before ours.

This was the day the white, old man was sworn in,
the shade of blue at the horizon bloomed,
it glistened on wreckage on the highways,
gleamed on garbage bin covers, shone on tents
of the homeless of Los Angeles, woke
office workers living cramped in their cars,
it gave a sparkle to the crisp whiteness
of the hospital sheets of the dying
and of those already tightly tucked,
it lit the faces of nurse and doctor
leaning against the hospital's wall,
smoking, punctuation to the graveyard shift,
nary a word to each other, allowing
only the eloquence of cigarette smoke.

The growing blue started to encroach
on the part of the sky owned by the noon,
it moved with the stealth of clouds, lent its color
to the streams and seas of other people,
brown in their brown lands, waking to work,
a woman with a buri hat stopped and stood
in the middle of a rice field, as if listening,
the flooded fields gleamed under the blue sky,
she stood on the mound between paddies,
hearing the words of the white, old man
on a podium beyond the horizon,
words flapping from that day before today,
he spoke from the land feared by many,
she heard, and with a nod no one will notice,
she thought of giving the man a chance.