Elizabeth Alexander's piece features 14 unrimed tercets, with a single line finish.
“Each day we go about our business”
The opening lines state a mundane fact; as people move through their day, they pass other people, sometimes looking at each other, sometimes speaking to each other.
“All about us is noise. All about us is”
The second tercet declares, “All about us is noise,” and then repeats. Into a city scene of people bustling about, suddenly “bramble” and “thorn” appear. The exaggeration of “each / one of our ancestors on our tongues,” paints a strange, bloated image.
“Someone is stitching up a hem, darning”
The third, fourth, and fifth tercets offers a list of Whitmanesque laborer-at-his/her-labor images. Instead of letting the images speak for themselves, however, as Whitman does, this poet finds it necessary to explain. After presenting people at their various repairs, “stitching up a hem,” “darning a hole,” “patching a tire,” the speaker tells the reader what s/he just read: those folks are “repairing the things in need of repair.”
The speaker then reports, “someone is trying to make music,” “a woman and her son wait for the bus,” and farmer evaluates the weather, while a teacher gives a test.
“We encounter each other in words, words”
The speaker reveals that the collective “we” are “encounter[ing] each other in words.” The seventh tercet attempts to symbolize “dirt roads and highways” as barriers in service of overcoming distance.
“I know there’s something better down the road”
Playing on the fabricated symbol of “roads,” the speaker prosaically states that she knows “something [is] better down the down.” Then she offers a juvenile remark about finding a safe place, followed by the line, “We walk into that which we cannot yet see,” straining for profundity.
“Say it plain: that many have died for this day”
The speaker then commands herself, “Say it plain,” implying that she had not been “plain,” although her lines have offered mostly literal prose broken into lines to look like poetry.
In the ninth and tenth tercets, the speaker situates her historical, racial allusions: she wants to say plainly, “many have died for this day.” She commands her listeners to “sing the name of the dead who brought us here / who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, // picked the cotton and the lettuce, built / brick by brick the glittering edifices / they would then keep clean and work inside of.”
“Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day”
The eleventh tercet offers exclamations calling for a “praise song for struggle,” as well as the piece’s title, “praise song for the day.” In addition, she calls for a “Praise song for every hand-lettered sign, / the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.” All those Obama signs deserve a praise-song; all the folks sitting around kitchen tables "figuring-it-out" that Obama will fix their finances deserve a praise-song.
“Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself”
Tercets 12-14 are a nattering of professorial philosophy about love, masquerading as heart-felt profundity: “Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself / others by first do no harm,” “What if the mightiest word is love?”
And just when the speaker begins to achieve genuine poetic value in the two strongest lines in the work, “Love beyond marital, filial, national, / love that casts a widening pool of light,” she destroys the achievement with discord in the line, “love with no need to pre-empt grievance.” Not pre-empting grievance allows grievance to worsen. The “widening pool of light” dries up in political posturing.
“In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air”
The final tercet is unremarkable except that readers may hear an echo of the Clinton inaugural verse, Maya Angelou’s “On the Pulse of the Morning,” in the line, “On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp.”
The final line, standing orphaned, “praise song for walking forward in that light,” solicits the question, which light? That “widening pool of light,” one supposes—the one that was darkened by partisan incursion.
Other Alexander Articles
Linda Sue Grimes - As a writer, researcher, and SRF devotee, Linda Sue Grimes has studied poetry and practiced Kriya Yoga for over thirty years..
