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Inauguration Day, 2025

David Wojahn

1953 –

^{… dreadful was the din}
^{Of hissing through the hall, thick swarming now}
^{With complicated monsters … —“Paradise Lost,” Book X}

The snow had buried Monument
*
Where the Teslas spun their burnished wheels
*
& the twice-dead Confederates ghost their plots
*
& Lee & Stonewall dismembered still sprawl,
*
Their bubble-wrapped limbs akimbo
*
In their warehouse crates, & they wait to be
*
ensorcelled back to bespoken life.
*
One hundred miles north the oligarchs clap,
*
All of them turned to hissing serpents
*
Seething & cat-cradling the Rotunda floor,
*
Their darkling Prince droning on & on.
*
They are stench & slither, their cobra-heads rear.
*
They own us now. They python-swallow
*
Each & everyone. Swallow us whole.

David Wojahn is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose, including For the Scribe (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017); World Tree (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), the recipient of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; and Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems, 1982–2004 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the winner of the O. B. Hardison Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library. A professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, Wojahn lives in Richmond.

Themes

About this Poem

“After watching footage of Donald Trump’s second inauguration, I was reminded of a scene toward the end of Milton’s Paradise Lost, in which Satan has returned to hell after the fall of Adam and Eve and calls his minions to his throne room to celebrate. But soon after he begins his speech, he and every demon in the audience is suddenly transformed into a serpent or a monster. I live in Richmond, Virginia, where statues of dead Confederate leaders—until very recently—adorned a street called Monument Avenue. The poem is a loose sonnet and is indebted [to] Robert Lowell’s much stricter sonnet, ‘Inauguration Day: January 1953.’”
—David Wojahn

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More by this poet

Catawba Cotton Mill, 1908

Propping his tripod, Hine remembers
Childhood snowfall in Wisconsin,
Flakes careening in prairie wind,

A red sleigh skimming a frozen lake,
Curlicued breath-mist of two dappled drays.
But this is a blizzard of cotton dust

David Wojahn

2014

For the Scribe Gar.Una of Uruk, 3,000 B. C.

—author of the earliest known signature

That arrow & life were homonyms. That his name
Predates all others, incised sunbaked on a slab
Of Eupratian clay. Stylus a broken reed, though it

Carries somehow the bedazzled opalescent mojo
Of transfiguration. The hand which holds it edges right
& reaching the margin circles back, right to left

David Wojahn

2014

Another Epistle to Frank O'Hara

On the Forty-Ninth Birthday of "The Day Lady Died"

It is 3:00 in the torpid New South, three days past Bastille Day & yes
        this is the form you fashioned,
isn't it?

David Wojahn

2012

Poems

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Inauguration Day, 2025

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