MaxwellCorydonWheatJr.com
Welcome to the Website of Maxwell Corydon Wheat Jr.
People’s Poet Laureate of Nassau County, N.Y.
Everything in life can be expressed as poetry. There is never a moment that does not lend itself to becoming a poem, much to the chagrin of my family. I will write a poem in the middle of a church service, in line at the movies, at the dinner table. I have no shame when it comes to poetry.
Featured Poem
Barack Obama & Afghanistan
"...the law of love is involved in all approximations of justice…”
Reinhold Neibuhr
A twenty-minute monologue about Reinhold Neibuhr, 
Barrack Obama stuns his interviewer--
his fascination with the 20s-60s theologian, social thinker,
vigorous critic of Henry Ford:
documents inhumane assembly conditions,
allows union organizers his Detroit pulpit.
Icon of colleges’ philosophy departments
Barack Obama, reader of any number of Neibuhr books:
“Moral Man and Immoral Society”
“Faith and History”
“Christianity and Power Politics”
“The Irony of American History”
Neibuhr’s work’ says one scholar,
“devoted to reconciling the concept of perfect love
with a world in constant violent conflict.”
Philosopher of “just war.”
Yes, destroy the Nazis, a “just war.”
Not wars for oil, for spheres of influence--
Afghanistan--Iraq
Barack Obama, man with intellectual enthusiasm
Barack Obama, man with passion for humanity
Barack Obama, like a leader prophesized to be our
President of the United States
·
March 18, 2008
Constitution Hall, Philadelphia
He tells his story:
Mother--American, Scot-English descent
Father,--Kenyan, Luo Tribe.
“It’s a story,” the presidential candidate confides
“that has seared into my genetic makeup
the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts
– that out of many, we are truly one.”
Language of an Abraham Lincoln!
Think of combinations of words like that of the president
who loved the diction of Shakespeare--The Bible
coming to the American people in White House addresses
October 29, 2009
Dover Air Force Base, Delaware,
President Obama’s Gettysburg obeisance:
pre-dawn, standing at attention on the tarmac
his salute practiced and precise.
Eighteen killed a single week in Afghanistan.
Their caskets, carefully, caringly, covered with the American flag
borne slowly from gray C-17 cargo plane by khaki uniformed military
The President’s presence—Hope!
No more a 19-year-old soldier who loved the Philadelphia Phillies
No more a 22-year old Marine “goal-oriented, career-oriented”
No more brothers, 43-41, soldiers proud of their Navajo ancestry
In Iraq--Afghanistan
reduced into corpses conveyed home in catacombs of military transports
December 1, 2009
The United States Military Academy at West Point
Citadel: America’s Might and Valor
“The Long Gray Line:”
Swift--Grant—Lee--Pershing
Bradley—Patton--MacArthur—Eisenhower
Here, Commander-in-Chief George W. Bush
brings his Doctrine of Preemptive Strike
Here, Commander-in-Chief Barack Obama
brings to the American people his “War of Necessity”
·
Maxwell Corydon Wheat, Jr.
· First Poet Laureate
· Nassau County, New York
· 2007-09
Permission given to use poem, “Barack Obama—Afghanistan, “ by Maxwell Corydon Wheat, Jr., with author credit
