"Sir" - Miller Williams, poet

(to our Presidents in the past and in passing)

Sir
(One of the President's people has something to say January 20, 1981)

In the first world we know there is only the present.
Nothing was or will be. Then only the future.
Then only the past, and then we are the past,

This we understand is the nature of things.

Still, when Time falls in to fill the places
our unaccountable hands have hollowed out,
we, being who we are, will flail against it
because we have not done what we meant to do,
because there has not been much that we understood
and the little we learned returned us to where we started.

This may also be in the nature of things.

We have dreamed of honor and the forthright heart
as persons blind from birth imagine light
have barely begun to find the uses of love,
have learned to speak of that giving and greedy God
who is the earth and will not forgive us always,
into whose mouths we have lowered our fathers and mothers
and children forever. He is jealous and knows our names.

History stands, like a sad teacher, beside us,
waiting to lay a ruler across our backs
to say again that we have answered wrongly.

What we wanted to do we have not done
but we have done a hard thing to do.
Love (this most worn word) we have not understood;
on rare days, even so, we have used it well.

What we wanted to do we have not done
but we have done the longest thing to do.

This is not to commemorate an end.

What have we done? Sir, we have done right.
Right once done, there is no ending to it.