Inauguration Day, 2025
… dreadful was the din
Of hissing through the hall, thick swarming now
With complicated monsters … —“Paradise Lost,” Book X
The snow had buried Monument
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Where the Teslas spun their burnished wheels
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& the twice-dead Confederates ghost their plots
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& Lee & Stonewall dismembered still sprawl,
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Their bubble-wrapped limbs akimbo
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In their warehouse crates, & they wait to be
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ensorcelled back to bespoken life.
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One hundred miles north the oligarchs clap,
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All of them turned to hissing serpents
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Seething & cat-cradling the Rotunda floor,
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Their darkling Prince droning on & on.
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They are stench & slither, their cobra-heads rear.
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They own us now. They python-swallow
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Each & everyone. Swallow us whole.
Copyright © 2025 by David Wojahn. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 23, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“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
David Wojahn
