I feel I don't have what I want from my president;
I worked hard on his campaign;
Race, peace, equality, environment, health
I want all, immediately. What disappointment!
The man is trifling with inimicals, mine and his.

Obama deposited his agenda and withdrew.
The rightists grew bold; their officials withheld handshakes.
The antic right was gruesome in its protests.
I felt deprived of my right to have my man
Go left to govern, as he promised to govern pragmatically.

The curd of pragmatic promise lies in my stomach.
With historical acids embiled in nine-eleven.
The congestion will not go down, cannot come up.
It's mass is the stuff of fifty years of failure
Waiting in me to flip from hope to symbol.(1)

ii. What?

Unity strategy.

I call upon an acorn
To lend its form to my thought.

It leads my mind to tossing leaves
On stalks of mind, a contraption of distraction
Set in wind to make wild deformations.

I stare through nature's unrequitting eye.
I see burnt trees above new forest.
They are paternosters(2) lifting devastation
To my note of oak reforming the pines.

There compounding future is only human proposing
Deals for revolving deliria from deals gone bad to worse.
Disunions of reasoning compromise do not displace my mind
As it strays and grasps for glory from struggle to regaining struggle.
So the tribal forest shelf of my mind finds it seared
Enough to resemble a word of acorn shape to roll
From a hot human tongue to willing cool silent transformation
From suspected, unglorified, unpracticed and ill-advised reformation.

1. My career in the civil rights movement was fixed in 1958. It stemmed from the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Schoolboard requiring racial desegregation. It was further fixed as a specialty in 1968 with the advent of the National Fair Housing Act. The result of my practice, on retirement in 1998, was a net loss of residential integration. During the next years, I sat on the Shawangunk rocks, swinging my feet to the beat of historical periods that have heeded the need of the federal government to show a symbol of human rights in America to the rest of the world. I capped my career with notes towards the next swing of the civil rights pendulum. All changed on 9/11/01. The pendulum rock I was riding to serene consolation changed its periodicity. The change interrupted the course of symbol and hope. History heated its consequences in the rough back-sliding era marked for me by a singular quote from a low-level Bush Administration official set in the sensuality of my hearing of the era: We are beyond symbol and hope; "We make our own reality." Obama's announcement of pragmatic reality was fresh but chilling to me. I have been adjusting to the Obama cool symbol of hope for refixing American history.

2. In this work, paternoster is used as a low-order dictionary definition derived form Vulgate Latin into most European languages. The word hiding in a list of religious contexts has an out of context that pops a mechanism of moving parts above a sullen tundra of old relevance. The contrapted paternoster is an ungodly machine for moving items up and down between floors in a building. A stack of shelves on an endless revolving belt does the lifting and sinking. I have seen this devil machine at work in the 42nd Street library. Its inhuman context is its minder's complete mindless attention. Having seen this wonder and asked its name from its minder, my memory now retrieves the word I never in a half century used. With a wild cool imagination completely overwhelming odds of successful conveyance I set Obama's Unity Strategy on a shelf I distinctly, sensually behold.

Tom Gale had a 40-year career in civil rights advocacy. His role was statistical analyst. He holds degrees in mathematics from MIT. For balance, he read and wrote poetry. Since retiring in 1998 from New York City to Cragsmoor, he has experimented with the use of poetry in political commentary. He posts samples and notes on these experiments on a website: www.tomgale.info.