>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.
>> Please welcome the 14th Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden.
[ Applause ]
>> Carla Hayden: Thank you.
Hello and welcome.
I'm delighted to see all of you here with us today
for our new poet laureate's opening reading.
You may clap right now.
[ Applause ]
As the Librarian of Congress,
I'm charged with appointing the poet laureate consultant
in poetry every year, a position that, by law,
is described as equivalent to that
of poet laureate of the United States.
What an awesome responsibility.
The Library surveyed over 120 poetry experts from coast-to-coast: editors
and critics, publishers, bookstore owners, and of course,
our former poet laureates.
And in the end, the choice was crystal clear.
But before I sing the praises of our new appointee,
I want to introduce a very special guest.
This year, for the first time ever,
our nation has its own national youth poet laureate [applause].
Now, this position was almost a decade in the making.
In 2008, the literary organization, Urban Word,
worked with New York City to launch their youth poet laureate program.
And since then, 41 other cities across the country,
from Seattle to South Florida, Boston to Los Angeles,
Madison to Baton Rouge, followed suit.
And this past year, Urban Word identified its first group
of regional national youth poet laureate finalists in the Northeast,
Southeast, South, Midwest, and West.
And in April, they named the first ever national youth poet laureate.
Now, Urban Word didn't do it all alone.
There were plenty of organizations to thank for this nationwide effort.
And please join me in recognizing a few
of Urban Words' wonderful local partners.
Do More Baltimore, the host
for Baltimore's youth poet laureate [applause].
Dialect USA, the host for Prince George's County's youth poet
laureate [applause].
And Words, Beats, and Life, the host for the Washington, DC,
youth poet laureate [applause].
And finally, thank you to Michael Cirelli,
executive director of Urban Word.
Michael, could you please stand up?
[applause].
There he is.
Your vision and hard work has paid off tenfold, and the Library
of Congress is delighted to do its part
in promoting the national youth poet laureate.
And what an inspiring young woman you found to take on that role.
In her 19 years, LA native Amanda Gorman has done more to speak out,
organize, and give back than most of us do in a lifetime.
I had the pleasure of riding the elevator today with her grandmother.
Can you please stand up?
[ Applause ]
Now, you can read about Amanda's many accomplishments
in your program, or talk to her grandmother.
And tonight we have the privilege
to hear Amanda read a poem she's composed especially
for this occasion.
So please join me in welcoming Amanda Gorman,
the nation's first youth poet laureate.
[ Applause ]
>> Amanda Gorman: Amanda, center yourself, get ready.
Before I read my poem, I want to give my most sincere thank you
to the Library of Congress and Tracy K Smith for involving me
in such a phenomenal occasion.
So a round of applause to this program, please [applause].
My poem is called In This Place, an American Lyric.
There's a poem in this place in the footfalls in the halls
in the quiet beat of the seats.
It is here, at the curtain of day,
where America writes a lyric you must whisper to say.
There's a poem in this place in the heavy grace, the lined face
of this noble building, collections burned and reborn twice.
There's a poem in Boston's Copley Square where protest chants tear
through the air like sheets of rain,
where love of the many swallows hatred of the few.
There's a poem in Charlottesville where tiki torches string a ring
of flame tight round the wrist of night where men
so white they gleam blue seem like statues where men heap
that long wax burning ever higher where Heather Heyer blooms forever
in a meadow of resistance.
There's a poem in the great sleeping giant of Lake Michigan,
defiantly raising its big blue head to Milwaukee
and Chicago a poem begun long ago, blazed into frozen soil,
strutting upward and aglow.
There's a poem in Florida, in East Texas, where streets swell
into a nexus of rivers, cows afloat like mottled buoys in the brown,
where courage is now so common
that 23-year-old Jesus Contreras rescues people from floodwaters.
There's a poem in Los Angeles yawning wide as the Pacific tide
where a single mother swelters in a windowless classroom, teaching black
and brown students in Watts to spell out their thoughts
so her daughter might write this poem for you.
There's a lyric in California where thousands of students march
for blocks, undocumented and unafraid;
where my friend Rosa finds the power to blossom in deadlock,
her spirit the bedrock of her community.
She knows hope is like a stubborn ship gripping a dock, a truth:
that you can't stop a dreamer or knock down a dream.
How could this not be her city su nacion our country our America,
our American lyric to write a poem by the people, the poor,
the Protestant, the Muslim, the Jew, the native, the immigrant,
the black, the brown, the blind, the brave, the undocumented
and undeterred, the woman, the man, the nonbinary, the white, the trans,
the ally to all of the above and more?
Tyrants fear the poet.
Now that we know it we can't blow it.
We owe it to show it not slow it although it hurts to sew it
when the world skirts below it.
Hope, we must bestow it like a wick in the poet so it can grow, lit,
bringing with it stories to rewrite the story of a Texas city depleted
but not defeated a history written
that need not be repeated a nation composed but not yet completed.
There's a poem in this place, a poem in America a poet in every American
who rewrites this nation, who tells a story worthy of being told
on this minnow of an earth to breathe hope into a palimpsest
of time, a poet in every American who sees
that our poem penned doesn't mean our poem's end.
There's a place where this poem dwells, it is here, it is now,
in the yellow song of dawn's bell
where we write an American lyric we are just beginning to tell.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> Carla Hayden: Well, thank you, Amanda, for your wonderful poem
and for setting the stage for our poet laureate, Tracy K Smith.
If Amanda represents where poetry can go, Tracy has brought us here
and there in poem after poem and book after book.
During the selection process, I had the opportunity to sit down at home
and read Tracy's Pulitzer prize-winning poetry collection,
Life on Mars, and I was wowed.
In poem such as My God, it's Full of Stars, the Speed of Belief, and Yes,
Life on Mars, Tracy takes us farther than we imagine we can go,
to the great beyond and deeply inward as well.
Her poems walk us through their wandering.
Their power is that they can go anywhere they want: scientific fact,
pop artifacts, bits of memories, and arguments of faith.
They aren't simple but they are direct.
And they aren't afraid to face the painful parts
of our past and present.
My favorite moment in the book came in the poem, They may love all
that he has chosen and hate all that he has rejected.
While the title dates back more than 2000 years to the Dead Sea Scrolls,
the poem moves straight to the present-day horror
of hate crimes making news.
Tracy shows us in a new and yet intuitive way how hatred changes us.
Instead of just reading about hatred, she asks us to imagine it,
to feel it, to own it, in a way that can't be easily ignored.
The great American poet William Carlos Williams wrote,
It is difficult to get the news from poems,
yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.
Our great American poet and newest poet laureate knows how
to give us the news our minds and hearts and souls most need.
Please join me in welcoming Tracy K Smith.
[ Applause ]
>> Tracy K Smith: Thank you, Dr. Hayden.
And thank you, Amanda.
I feel so much joy and hope and belief
when I hear your voice, Amanda.
I know the future is in good hands
and that poetry will remain alive and well.
So thank you.
And, Dr. Hayden, it's such an honor
to be selected and introduced by you.
I remember when I was very young, I started but was never able
to finish a poem in which I was trying
to imagine the afterlife as a librarian.
And I think I was on to something, because moving
through these mammoth buildings, through the hallways,
the beautiful halls, and then the underside of the building,
all the tunnels, I realize there's something magnificent
and divine that's housed here.
But there's also something ethereal that is born of the energy
and the belief that builds places like this.
So I'm extremely grateful to be here tonight.
I'm excited about the year ahead and the conversation
that poetry will allow me to have with my fellow Americans.
So I thought I would go back to the beginning and read a few poems
from each of my books and finish with some newer work that makes
up my forthcoming book, Wade in the Water.
These are poems from the Body's Question.
A Hunger so Honed.
Driving home late through town, he woke me for a deer in the road,
the light smudge of it fragile in the distance,
free in a way that made me ashamed for our flesh.
His hand on my hand, even the weight of our voices not speaking.
I watched a long time, and a long time after we were too far to see,
told myself I still saw it nosing the shrubs, all phantom and shadow,
so silent it must have seemed I hadn't wakened.
But passed into a deeper, more cogent state of dream.
The mind a dark city, a disappearing,
a handkerchief, swallowed by a fist.
I thought of the animal's mouth and the hunger entrusted it.
A hunger so honed the green leaves merely maintain it.
We want so much, when perhaps we live best in the spaces
between loves, that unconscious roving,
the heart its own rough animal.
Unfettered.
The second time, there were two that faced us a moment the way deer will
in their Greek perfection, as though we were just some offering the night
had delivered.
They disappeared between two houses, and we drove on,
our own limbs sloppy after that, our need for one another greedy, weak.
[ Applause ]
You're going to get tired if I make you clap
after each poem, so don't worry.
So a large portion of my first book is dedicated to the memory
of my mother, who died when I was 22.
And so I'm going to read just a couple of sections from what I think
of as the heartbeat of this book, which is an elegy to her called Joy.
Imagining yourself a girl again,
you ask me to prepare a simple meal of dumplings and kale.
The body is memory.
You are nine years old, playing hospital with your sisters.
These will be my medicine, you tell them, taking a handful
of the raisins that you love.
They've made the room dark and covered you with a quilt,
though this is the South in summer.
The body's appetite.
You savor the kale, trusting this one need.
But the body is cautious, does not want more than it wants.
Soon there will be a traffic of transparent tubes,
striking their compromise with the body.
When you close your eyes, I know you are listening
to a dark chamber around a chord of light.
I know you are deciding that the body's a question:
What do you believe in?
It will rain tomorrow, as it rained in the dark days after you died.
And I will struggle with what to wear, and take a place
on the bus among those I will only ever know
by the shape their shoulders make above the backs
of the seats before mine.
It's November, and storm clouds ascend
about the roofs outside my window.
I don't know anymore where you've gone to.
Whether your soul waits here in my room, in the kitchen
with the newly blown bulb, or whether it rose instantly
to the kingdom of hosannas.
Some nights, walking up my steps in the dark, digging for the mail
and my keys, I know you are far, infinitely far from us.
That you watch in the way one of us might pause a moment
to watch a frenzy of ants, wanting to help, to pick up the crumb
and put it down Close to their hill, seeing their purpose that clearly.
These are some poems from Duende.
Many of you will recognize that term as one that Garcia Lorca kind
of brought into the wider vocabulary of art.
It's used to describe the wild, often times dark
and unpredictable energy that we all house, not just artists but people.
And that a daring artist might seek to draw out
and wrestle with in art making.
I loved that so much when I was a student reading about it in workshop
and saying, oh, I want to have that kind of passionate sense of my work.
And then years later, traveling, I realized this sense of wrestling
with something that might undo you and surviving the effort
with something remarkable to show, something that's not just beautiful
but something that's raw and damaged and profound,
that's not just something artists do.
I think about the way that people all over the world,
all over our world, are wrestling with something that seeks
to undo them and they do their best.
And oftentimes they overcome it.
And so this concept became something that had to do
with just the urgency of being human.
So I'll read you a couple of poems
from that book that's thinking with it.
The first one is set in Spain, where the speaker
of the poem is observing the art form, the traditional art form,
of the deep song that Lorca worked so hard to translate
to readers outside of Spain.
This poem is called Duende.
The earth is dry and they live wanting.
Each with a small reservoir of furious music heavy in the throat.
They drag it out and with nails
in their feet coax the night into being.
Brief believing.
A skirt shimmering with sequins and lies.
And in this night that is not night, each word is a wish,
each phrase a shape their bodies ache to fill.
I'm going to braid my hair braid many colors
into my hair I'll put a long braid in my hair
and write your name there.
They defy gravity to feel tugged back.
The clatter, the mad slap of landing.
And not just them.
Not just the ramshackle family, the tios, Primitos,
not just the bailaor whose heels have notched and hammered time
so the hours flow in place like a tin river,
marking only what once was.
Not just the voices of scraping against the river,
nor the hands nudging them farther,
fingers like blind birds, palms empty, echoing.
Not just the women with sober faces and flowers in their hair,
the ones who dance as though they're burying memory, one last time.
Beneath them.
And I hate to do it here.
To set myself heavily beside them.
Not now that they've proven the body a myth,
a parable for what not even language moves quickly enough to name.
If I call it pain, and try to touch it with my hands, my own life,
it lies still and the music thins, a pulse felt for through garments.
If I lean into the desire it starts from.
If I lean unbuttoned into the blow of loss after loss,
love tossed into the ecstatic void, it carries me with it farther,
to chords that stretch and bend like light through colored glass.
But it races on, toward shadows where the world I know
and the world I fear threaten to meet.
There is always a road, the sea, dark hair, dolor.
Always a question bigger than itself.
They say you're leaving Monday, why can't you leave on Tuesday?
[ Applause ]
And this poem is one that I kind of think of as an example
of like the domestic duende.
It's called Slow Burn.
We tend toward the danger at the center.
Soft core teeming blue with fire.
We tend toward what will singe and flare,
but coil back when brought near.
Sometimes we read about people pushed there
and left to recover, they don't.
Come out mingled or not at all,
minds flayed by visions no one can fathom.
I have a cousin who haunts the basement
of my aunt's house, drinking her liquor.
The air around him is cold, and he swings at it, working himself
into a sweat like a boxer or an addict.
Sometimes he comes upstairs to eat her food,
feeding the thing inside him.
We laugh, thinking laughter will make us safe, then we go home
and lie down in our lives.
Sometimes when my thoughts won't sit still, I imagine Marcus
down there awake in the dark, hands fisted in his lap, or upturned,
open in what might be a kind of prayer.
I'm certain the same thing dragging his heart drags ours,
only he's not afraid to name it.
Can call it up into the room and swear at it, or let it rest there
on the couch beside him till his had slumps onto his chest
and the TV bruises the walls with unearthly light.
[ Applause ]
In some ways, although I didn't realize it
when I was writing these poems, Life on Mars is a book that's seeking
to answer that question from my first book, What do You Believe in.
And there are so many different directions that the poems go
in an effort to bring something coherent
and consoling together for me.
This is a poem called The Weather in Space.
Is God being or pure force.
The wind or what commands it.
When our lives slow and we can hold all that we love,
it sprawls in our laps like a gangly doll.
When the storm kicks up and nothing is ours,
we go chasing after all we're certain to lose.
So alive faces radiant with panic.
Cathedral Ciche [phonetic].
Does God love gold.
Does he shine back at himself from walls like these leafed
in the earth's softest wealth.
Women light candles.
Pray into their fistful of beads.
Cameras spit human light into the vast holy dark.
And what glistens back is high up and cold.
I feel man here.
The same wish that named the planets.
Man with his shoes and tools, his insistence
to prove we exist, just like God.
In the large and the small.
The great and the frayed.
In the chords that rise from the tall brass pipes
and the chorus of crushed cans.
Someone drags over cobbles in the secular street.
There is a little bit of us sort of science fiction
or wishful understanding of the actual principles of science
that runs through this book.
So I'll just read you a little sample of that.
You might remember from -- well, if anyone ever read the novelization
of cupric's wonderful film 2001 A Space Odyssey,
it opens with the line -- or dot dot dot, my God it's full of stars.
There's something that I'm not remembering
that precedes that statement.
And then if any of you like me ever saw the movie 2010,
that film opens with that quote.
So that sense of the future that I grew up on in science fiction
that was made in the '60s and '70s, film mostly.
With something that drove my visual imagination in this book,
thinking about how innocent those old versions
of the future always feel once we've, you know, we pass them up.
And so that's part of what's running through this poem.
But, of course, it's also an elegy for my father.
So I'll read you just a few sections
in which some of these things come up.
My God it's Full of Stars.
Perhaps the great error is believing we are alone,
that the others have come and gone, a momentary blip.
When all along, space might be chock full of traffic.
Bursting at the seams with energy we neither feel nor see,
flush against us, living, dying, deciding, setting solid feet
down on planets everywhere.
Bowing to the great stars that command.
Pitching stones at whatever are their moons.
They live wondering if they are the only ones.
Knowing only the wish to know
and the great black distance they, we, flicker in.
Maybe the dead know.
Their eyes widening at last.
Seeing the high beams of a million galaxies flick on at twilight.
Hearing the engines flare, the horns not letting up, the frenzy of being.
I want it to be one notch below bedlam, like a radio without a dial.
Wide-open, so everything floods in at once.
And sealed tight so nothing escapes, not even time, which should curl
in on itself and loop around like smoke.
So that I might be sitting now beside my father
as he raises a lit match to the bowl of his pipe
for the first time in the winter of 1959.
In those last scenes of cupric's 2001, when Dave is whisked
into the center of space, which unfurls in an aurora
of orgasmic light, before opening wide like a jungle orchid
for a lovestruck bee, then goes liquid, paint in water,
and then gauze wafting out and off before finally the night tide,
luminescent and vague, swirls in.
And on and on.
In those last scenes as he floats above Jupiter's vast canyons
and seas over the lava strewn plains and mountains packed in ice,
that whole time he doesn't blink.
In his little ship, blind to what he rides,
whisked across the wide screen of unparceled time.
Who knows what blazes through his mind.
Is it still his life he moves through.
Or does that end at the end of what he can name.
On set, it's shot after shot, till cupric is happy.
Then the costumes go back on their racks.
And the great gleaming set goes black.
When my father worked on the Hubble telescope,
he said they operated like surgeons.
Scrubbed and sheathed in papery green.
The room a clean cold and bright white.
He'd read Larry Niven at home and drink scotch on the rocks.
His eyes exhausted and pink.
These were the Reagan years, when we lived with our finger on the button
and struggled to view our enemies as children.
My father spent whole seasons bowing before the Oracle eye,
hungry for what it would find.
His face lit up whenever anyone asked and his arms would rise
as if he were weightless, perfectly at ease
in the neverending night of space.
On the ground, we tied postcards to balloons for peace.
Prince Charles married Lady Di.
Rock Hudson died.
We learned new words for things.
The decade changed.
The first few pictures came back blurred.
And I felt ashamed for all the cheerful engineers,
my father and his tribe.
The second time, the optics jibed.
We saw to the edge of all there is.
So brutal and alive, it seemed to comprehend us back.
I'll never now read this poem and not think of this place.
Because on my last visit to the Library,
a wonderful librarian named Nanette
and her colleagues pulled the archive
of Hubble space telescope materials and set them up for me.
And she said, I was looking at these pictures.
Everybody's wearing masks.
They're in these clean outfits.
But I was hoping one of them might be your father.
But don't worry, I'm going to go through his military archive and see
if I can find anything for you.
So this is wonderful [applause].
I'm going to read some newer poems.
I might go backwards.
But I have a new book of poems that will be coming out this spring.
And a lot of the themes that I've always been interested in,
I continue to be interested in.
I think primarily they have to do with how we treat each other.
Whether that means intimate relationships or, you know,
the people we never ever meet but upon whom our lives have an effect.
And it's a book that's seeking to explore that question
by looking backward toward history in some moments
and also looking at us now, as we are.
And one of the things that I find myself really thinking about
or maybe willfully meditating upon is this notion of compassion.
As an act or a mode that we can choose to operate in.
And often we fail to do that.
So I'll reach you from around this book
in which you'll hear different versions
of that, that consideration.
I think the other little thing I'd say about this book is that,
whereas Life on Mars is trying to imagine this universe,
the vast thing that we know like a tiny little pinprick size amount
of information about with certainty, what I'm also interested in is what
that system belongs to or what continuum it is a part of.
And so I imagine that the history of eternity is something
that I'm also trying to will my brain to imagine.
Because we're a part of it, right.
And what we do is imprinting that in ways that we may not even recognize.
So this is a small poem that kind of dips its toe in that question.
It's called Garden of Eden.
What a profound longing I feel, just this very instant, for the Garden
of Eden on Montague Street.
Where I seldom shopped, usually only after therapy.
Elbow soar at the crook from a hand basket filled to capacity.
The glossy pastries, pomegranate, persimmon, quince.
Once a bag of black Beluga lentils spilt a trail behind me while I
labored to find a tea they refused to carry.
It was Brooklyn.
My 30s. Everyone I knew was living the same desolate luxury.
Each ashamed of the same things.
Innocence and privacy.
I'd lug home the paper bags,
doing bank balance math, and counting days.
I'd squint into it or close my eyes and let it slam me in the face.
The known sun setting on the dawning century.
About five months ago, I visited coastal Georgia to Geechee
and Gullah communities that make up the Sea Islands.
And I had the privilege to attend a ring shout, which is a tradition
that brings spiritual into just this really beautiful living rhythmic
space that reminds us of the deep connection
between African-American tradition and Africa.
When I went to this performance, I had been --
so I had been in the South for a number of days going to a lot
of sites of a very painful history.
Some of which were marked, many of which were not.
And then I walked into this space feeling, you know,
like a storm inside, just about like, you know, who we are,
what we come from, what we are able to acknowledge and what we're not.
And a woman who was one of the performers just walked up to me.
I'd never seen her before in my life.
And she said, I love you, and she gave me a hug.
And I just lost it.
I felt like, that's exactly what my soul needed to hear.
And I couldn't stop thinking about her.
And so this is the poem that came from that.
I've since met her again, and her name is Bertha McKnight.
And she's a member of the Geechee Gullah ring shouters.
And so this poem is dedicated to them.
Wade in The Water.
One of the women greeted me.
I love you, she said.
She didn't know me.
But I believed her.
And a terrible new ache rolled over in my chest, like in a room
where the drapes have been swept back.
I love you.
I love you.
As she continued down the hall past other strangers,
each feeling pierced suddenly by pillars of heavy light.
I love you, throughout the performance
in every hand clap, every stomp.
I love you in the rusted iron chains someone was made to drag,
until love let them be unclasped and left empty
in the center of the ring.
I love you in the water, where they pretended to wade,
singing that old blood deep song that dragged us
to those banks and cast us in.
I love you.
The angles of it scraping at each throat,
shouldering past the swirling dust motes in those beams of light,
that whatever we now knew we could let ourselves feel new to climb.
O, O, woods, O, dogs, O, tree, O, gun, O, girl run.
O, miraculous many gone.
O, Lord, O, Lord, O, Lord.
Is this love.
The trouble you promised.
[ Applause ]
So that poem leads into a Civil War poem that --
DC is just like such a wonderful -- I'm realizing now,
this Civil War poem was commissioned by the Smithsonian for an exhibit
of Civil War portraits a number of years ago.
So, wow, thank you.
It's a history that, of course, I learned about but I never felt
that I had a footing within it.
And so being asked to think about it was a real gift.
Because I had to say, well, what perspective am I curious about?
And I wanted to know about recorded testimonies or experiences
from black soldiers of that war and their families.
And so I found a number of sources that included letters that many
of soldiers or their widows or their families wrote
to President Abraham Lincoln, asking for help in some way.
Either getting their son paid or finding out if they were free yet.
And I also found a number of testimonies from depositions
that veterans and their families gave after the war, sometimes for,
you know, decades and decades after the war,
in an attempt to claim pension.
Slavery made it very difficult for blacks to do
that because there were not birth certificates
or marriage certificates that people had.
And so it was very difficult for them to prove that they had served.
So reading these documents, I felt like all I wanted
to do was make a space for them to exist together as a chorus.
And so I'm going to read you two sections
from a found poem called I Will Tell You The Truth About This,
I Will Tell You All About It.
And these two sections are written really as choruses
that every few lines is a different speaker,
but I feel like they're telling pieces of the same story.
Excellent, sir.
My son went in the 54th Regiment.
Sir, my husband, who is in company K 22nd Regiment US colored troops
and now in the Macon hospital at Portsmouth, with a wound in his arm,
has not received any pay since last May.
And then only $13.
Sir, we, the members of company D of the 55th Massachusetts volunteers,
call the attention of your Excellency to our case.
For instant, look and see that we never was freed yet.
Run right out of slavery in to soldiery.
And we hadn't nothing at all.
And our wives and mother most all of them is a perishing all about.
And we all are perishing our self.
I am willing to be a soldier and serve my time faithful like a man.
But I think it is hard to be put off in such dog-ish manner as that.
Will you see that the colored men fighting now are fairly treated?
You ought to do this.
And do it at once.
Not let the thing run along.
Meet it quickly and manfully.
We poor oppressed ones appeal to you and ask fair play.
So please, if you can do any good for us, do it in the name of God.
Excuse my boldness, but please, your reply will settle the matter
and will be appreciated by a colored man who is willing
to sacrifice his son in the cause of freedom and humanity.
I have nothing more to say.
Hoping that you will lend a listening ear
to an humble soldier, I will close.
Yours for Christ sake, I shall have to send this without a stamp,
for I ain't money enough to buy a stamp.
[ Applause ]
But wait, there's more.
I am 60 odd years of age.
I am 62 years of age next month.
I am about 65 years of age.
I reckon I am about 67 years old.
I am about 68 years of age.
I am on the rise of 80 years of age.
I am 89 years old.
I am 94 years of age.
I don't know my exact age.
I am the claimant in this case.
I have testified before you two different times before.
I filed my claim I think first about 12 years ago.
I am now an applicant for a pension.
Because I understand that all soldiers are entitled to a pension.
I claim pension under the general law, on account of disease of eyes,
as a result of smallpox contracted in service.
The varicose veins came on both my legs soon after the war
and the sores were there when I first put in my claim.
I claim pension for rheumatism and got my toe broke and I was struck
in the side with the breach of a gun, breaking my ribs.
I was a man stout and healthy, over 27 years of age when I enlisted.
When I enlisted, I had a little mustache and some chin whiskers.
I was a green boy right off the farm and did just what I was told to do.
When I went to enlist, the recruiting officer said to me,
your name is John Wilson.
I said no, my name is Robert Harrison.
But he put me down as John Wilson.
I was known while in service by that name.
I cannot read nor write and I do not know how my name was spelled
when I enlisted, nor do I know how it is spelled now.
I always signed my name while in the Army by making my mark.
I know my name by sound.
My mother said after my discharge
that the reason the officer put my name
down as John Wilson was he could draw my bounty.
I am the son of Solomon and Lucinda Sibley.
I am the only living child of Dennis Campbell.
My father was George Jordan and my mother was Millie Jordan.
My mother told me that John Barnett was my father.
My mother was Mary Eliza Jackson and my father Ruben Jackson.
My name on the role was Frank Nunn.
No, sir, it was not Frank Nurn.
My full name is Dick Lewis Barnett.
I am the applicant for pension on account of having served
under the name Lewis Smith,
which was the name I wore before the days of slavery were over.
My correct name is Hiram Kirkland.
Some persons call me Harry and others call me Henry,
but neither is my correct name.
The United States Welcomes You.
Why and by whose power were you sent?
What do you see that you may wish to steal?
Why this dancing?
Why do your dark bodies drink up all the light?
What are you demanding that we feel?
Have you stolen something?
Then what is that leaping in your chest?
What is the nature of your mission?
Do you seek to offer a confession?
Have you anything to do with others brought by us to harm?
Then why are you afraid?
And why do you invade our night, hands raised,
eyes wide, mute as ghosts?
Is there something you wish to confess?
Is this some animatic type of test?
What if we fail?
How and to whom do we address our appeal?
I think I will kind of wind down with just a couple of poems.
I want to read something that's a little bit happy.
Okay, this is a poem -- my daughter is here being so perfect
and wonderful in the front row [applause].
So this is a poem that was written a few years back.
It's called Four and a Half.
Morning finds her curled like a prawn around a stuffed blue Pegasus
or the smallest prawn pink lion.
Or else she's barging into my room and leaning in close.
So it's her hair I wake to.
That coarse, dark heaven of knots and purple fluff.
And she's hungry.
But first she has to pee.
Pee, pee, she sings, hopping in place.
Trying to stanch off the wild ravenous river she carries,
until I'm awake for real.
Saying, go, go, hurry before you wet the floor.
And then she tries and succeeds or else stands bereft relieved
as a pool trickles out around her feet.
She's like an island made of rock with one lone tree
at the top of the only mountain.
She's like the soul in Congas goat tethered to the tree.
Smiling almost as you approach.
Scraping the ground with its horns and then lickety-split,
lurching hard, daring the rope to snap.
She's hungry.
She wants bread, toasted, with no skin.
And enough butter to write her name in.
Or a bowl of cereal, but not the noisy kind.
She wants a movie or maybe just the tussle of her will against mine.
That scrape and crack, horn on rock, rope relenting one fiber at a time.
I want that, she says, punctuating what she just said she wanted.
Before I close with one last poem, I want to reiterate my thanks
to everyone here tonight, many of whom are family members, teachers,
friends, mentors, colleagues in this world of poetry.
And of course to Dr. Hayden and Rob Casper and the Library staff
who have just been so wonderful in making this feel
like it's not just a dream, this is real, this is really happening.
So thank you.
And of course, Amanda.
I'm excited to follow your voice.
An Old Story.
We were made to understand it would be terrible.
Every small want.
Every niggling urge.
Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind.
Livid the land and ravaged like a rageful dream.
The worst in us having taken over and broken the rest utterly down.
A long age passed, when at last we knew how little would survive us.
How little we had mended or built that was not now lost.
Something large and old awoke.
And then our singing brought on a different manner of weather.
Then animals long believed gone crept down from trees.
We took new stock of one another.
We wept to be reminded of such color.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at LOC.GOV.
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