President Donald Trump’s inaugural address, delivered after his swearing-in on Friday, struck almost apocalyptic notes about the current state of our country.
The tone of the speech is underscored by the list of words said for the first time in an American inaugural address, which The Washington Post reported in a graphic:
Bleed, carnage, tombstones, ripped, rusted, stolen ― many of the words on the list are uncharacteristically dark and even violent in nature for a speech to the nation at the dawn of a president’s term.
They’re also remarkably evocative, so it was only a matter of time before artists began to repurpose the cluster of words for their own uses. Author Randa Jarrar tweeted a poem she’d written using the Trumpian terms ― supplemented with some common words such as “a” and “my” ― that transforms the muscular language of the inaugural address into a haunting elegy of “solidarity in depletion” and a “wind-swept, stolen landscape.”
Jarrar’s poem is a far more poignant and eloquent marker of this historic occasion than the purported inaugural poem by Joseph Charles MacKenzie circulated earlier this week, and a subversive way of injecting poetry into an occasion where it wasn’t invited. (Unlike former President Barack Obama at his two inaugurations, Trump had no inaugural poet.)
Read the full poem, posted by Jarrar on her Twitter, above.
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