excerpt from...

The poem, titled "Praise Song for the Day: A Poem for Barack Obama's Presidential Inauguration," poet Elizabeth Alexander

"Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.
Some live by "Love thy neighbor as thy self."
Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.
What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.
In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light."

Source: cqpolitics.com
IMAGE>> https://gospelbyear.com/yahoo_site_admin/assets/images/praise2.31995003_std.jpg

Dr. Alexander offers a dual hope for Inauguration Day:

"I hope that on that day, people can experience fully the profound weight of the joy that so many people have struggled and fought for and died for to bring us to the day where we might see an African American elected President. So that is a tremendously, tremendously powerful thing for our nation, and not just for black people, for everyone who has said we can do something different than we have done before. ... "
"I hope that we can experience that profound joy in an almost cathartic way at the same time that we are able to soberly and purposefully look forward to the tremendous, tremendous work that’s ahead for the whole country, and that then-President Obama will be leading us through because, as we all know, these are very serious times. ... I hope that at the end of Inauguration Day, we have a sense of that “us” as a purposeful us."
"In other words that at the end of the day, we feel like we’ve had a joyful experience but that we also know what our work is."

https://www.pic2009.org/blog/entry/elizabeth_alexander_inaugural_profile/