The Poet and the Moment : The dinosaur, diversity and the hint of mortality

Who let that mastodon into the inauguration?

Maya Angelou, the award-winning poet, began her extraordinary inauguration poem with the unlikeliest of images: fossil traces of the mastodon and the dinosaur, the “dry tokens of their sojourn here on our planet floor.”

Those fossils are not just images of extinct species, they are reminders that no species has yet proved immortal, and our own is grievously threatened.

Thanks to Angelou, Muslims were mentioned in an inauguration for the first time in living memory, if not in history.

And not just Muslims, but, in a rhyming, almost merry interlude,

... the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew The African, the Native American, the Sioux, The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheik The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher, The privileged, the homeless, the Teacher.

This was the Angelou everyone expected to hear, of course.

The unexpected Angelou was the one who pointed her hearers past the strife of American race relations, past even the hostilities of great nations, to the plight of the human species. Peace, if we ever achieve it, will not be peace without a mission. The mission will be nothing less than the rescue of this Earth, our island home:

A River sings a beautiful song It says, come, rest here by my side, Each of you a bordered country, Delicate and strangely made, proud, Yet thrusting perpetually under siege. Your armed struggles for profit Have left collars of waste upon My shore, currents of debris upon my breast. Yet, today I call you to my riverside, If you will study war no more.

It will take people like President Bill Clinton at his best-- coalition-builders, practical politicians able to work with everybody--to bring the country and then the planet down by the riverside with Maya Angelou to study war no more and to study, instead, how the human species can save itself from becoming the next mastodon.