Remembering Frost at Kennedy’s Inauguration

By Linda Pastan b. 1932 Linda Pastan

Even the flags seemed frozen

to their poles, and the men

stamping their well-shod feet

resembled an army of overcoats.

But we were young and fueled

by hope, our ardor burned away

the cold. We were the president’s,

and briefly the president would be ours.

The old poet stumbled

over his own indelible words,

his breath a wreath around his face:

a kind of prophecy.

Linda Pastan, “Remembering Frost at Kennedy’s Inauguration” from Queen of a Rainy Country, published by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Copyright © 2006 by Linda Pastan. Reprinted by permission of The Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency, Inc.

Source: Queen of a Rainy Country (W. W. Norton & Company Inc., 2006)

Biography

Poet Linda Pastan was raised in New York City but has lived for most of her life in Potomac, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, DC. In her senior year at Radcliffe College, Pastan won the Mademoiselle poetry prize (Sylvia Plath was the runner-up). Immediately following graduation, however, she decided to give up writing poetry in order to concentrate on raising her family. After ten years at home, her husband urged her to . . .

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