When Obama Wins

Total strangers will embrace, and, for that brief instant, fall in love
There will be new noises, a new din that will replace the usual cacophony,
An expectant gurgle, drool falling from the lips of a new born
The moment when we are finally born, our lungs filling with air,
As we learn how to breathe, in a new atmosphere
When Obama wins

New planets, new constellations, new heavens, and a new earth
A new Securities and Exchange Commission
A new Home Owners Loan Corporation
Will sprout, unbidden, full grown,
Like Athena from the head of Zeus
When Obama wins


And no one will get sick or die, or at least,
No one’s money will get sick or die,
As new jobs spontaneously generate
Like maggots on rotting meat
When Obama wins

There will be singing and dancing,
Joe Sixpack will drink
And Soccer moms will boast of their Peles and Maradonas.
Russia will reclaim Alaska , and the ocean’s waves will part
And we will walk barefoot from Maine to Oahu
When Obama wins.

No longer black and white
But green and gold, indigo and scarlet
No longer from Europe or Asia,
But from Oz or Middle Earth, or Klingon
Each with a new imaginary ethnicity,
And no one will be from Kansas anymore,
When Obama wins.


Lions will lie down with the lambs
And no one will object, if they want to get married,
Every person will be of a different gender
And every state will be united, ecstatically,
When Obama wins

The Tigris and the Euphrates will flow into the Mississippi
And there will be blissful forgetting
Of central Asian geography
And with their newly fashioned pruning hooks
Our soldiers will come home and tend to our gardens
When Obama wins

Church bells will peal, muzzeins will chant
Buddhists will plan their next reincarnation
Atheists and evangelists will switch creeds
And rabbis will decide that it is good for the Jews
When Obama wins

A trumpet will sound,
There will be a calm and generous madness
A dethroning and undoing
Our Bastilles destroyed
And we will round up the rounders up
Of the usual suspects
When Obama wins

All will be a blur, a great Bacchanalian whirl,
A vast dance in every city center, filling every mall,
On Wall Street, on Main Street, on Mean Street, on Easy Street,
And we will all be drunk
V-J Day in Times Square
Kissing strangers with abandon
And new Eisenstaedts with cell phone cameras
Will take our pictures as mementoes
When Obama wins.