My children have grown up under the Bush plutocracy. So they're used to thinking of Election Day as an exercise in dread that is then followed up by Election Hangover Day, which their parents celebrate by way of gloomy discussions on the feasibility of moving to Canada. But last night my boys were starry-eyed. They pored over the New York Times website map of state returns; they groaned and cheered as Virginia wavered between red and blue. We all excitedly wondered what kind of puppy the Obama girls would choose and how often it would pee on the Oval Office rug.

Election night was wonderful: it really was. And today, when I was sitting in Dexter Discount Tire's waiting room being afflicted by CNN News, I saw, for the first time, that video everybody else has seen of Jesse Jackson weeping in Grant Park, and I thought, thank God that at least a few of these civil rights soldiers didn't miss out on this moment. And thank God that the people of Gary, Indiana--the U.S. city, according to my fact-filled son, where you're statistically most likely to be knifed in the back--learned they had the power to start changing the color of an entire state. It's about time. It truly is about time.

On Hangover Day 2004, the day after Bush's reelection, I wrote a poem called "Exile," which in snail-like fashion, is only now forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, so I won't quote the whole thing here. But this is how the poem ends. I'm glad to see, these four years later, that I hadn't quite lost all hope.

I tucked a weary child into each coat

pocket, wrapped the quiet

garden neat as a shroud

around my lover's warm heart,

cut the sun from its moorings

and hung it, burnished and fierce,

over my shield arm--a ponderous

weight to ferry so far across the waste--

though long nights ahead, I'll bless

its brave and crazy fire.