Poet Derek Walcott, winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature; the election of Barack Obama; exclusively for The Times:
Forty Acres
Out of the turmoil emerges one emblem, an engraving —a young Negro at dawn in straw hat and overalls,
an emblem of impossible prophecy, a crowd
dividing like the furrow which a mule has plowed,
parting for their president: a field of snow-flecked
cotton
forty acres wide, of crows with predictable omens
that the young plowman ignores for his unforgotten
cotton-haired ancestors, while lined on one branch, is
a tense
court of bespectacled owls and, on the field’s
receding rim —
a gesticulating scarecrow stamping with rage at him.
The small plow continues on this lined page
beyond the moaning ground, the lynching tree, the tornado’s
black vengeance,
and the young plowman feels the change in his veins,
heart, muscles, tendons,
till the land lies open like a flag as dawn’s sure
light streaks the field and furrows wait for the sower.