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GEORGE HELD Inauguration (1997) Sestina Snowflakes soar on the updraft between cars As my train switches engines, heading south. From nY to DC we’re mostly white; From DC south we become mainly black, The capital dividing the nation As electric yields to diesel power. It’s Inauguration Weekend: the power To govern rests with Clinton despite cares That some scandal will unseat the nation’s Leader, send him slinking home to the South Impeached, his reputation so blackened That even Newt’s by comparison looks white. Our national soap opera: Can white Men dominate the blackened halls of power Much longer? Can whites oversee blacks Of the generation seated in this car— Savvy, sanguine, and cool, restored down South, Ready to emancipate the nation, Grant absolution for the damnation Of racism? All these abstractions whitewash The suppurating gash of hate, Southern Born but long nurtured in dreams of white power Up North: ship all the Others in boxcars To a new Dachau, a final blackout. Had Lincoln lived, clothed in typical black, He’d have presided over our nation A hundred years ago, worn by the cares Of Reconstruction. Clinton, plagued by White Water, has no great cause and no great power As we face four more years of going south. I go to the capital of the South, Where Monument Ave. honors its first black And Lee/Jackson/King Day nods to the power Of blacks, where fear of miscegenation, Like cancer, still haunts the rebellious whites Who display the Stars and Bars on their cars. Like sand in dunes power shifts in the South And in this nation: together, might black And white overcome internecine cares? AMERICANA ...

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