98 The Meadow When the Oligarchs Are Gone Shaun T. Griffin Author note: this radio program was written on the eve of the 2020 election before the outcome was known. It aired the following Sunday on KWNKradio.org. The oligarchs echo on. As all of you know, we are on the eve of a crucial election, maybe the most crucial in my lifetime. The outcome of today’s vote will shape us for years and it would be foolish to do a program and not acknowledge that fact. A poet is someone who articulates what can be imagined and similarly lost and it is against this backdrop of possible futures on election eve that I begin. I first have to imagine we will have agency in our lives again—that is, we will act with choice and deliberation, not beholden to some metaphor of greed or avarice. I will imagine a frontier of humanity where each of us has value and there is not a place for some without a place for all. There will be no discomfort of color because my de facto leader did not prescribe it. There will be, if only for a moment, stasis of value and belief. People will not run from their shadows because they were told to. The stories in the streets will record jubilation and then a somber expression of hope: we will become witness to what is greater and not what is least in each of us. A witness is one who bears testimony. That is also what poets do and for a time, we will bear witness to change that not long ago, seemed improbable—until I remember the oligarchs before this who ran when their time was out. An oligarch is a pencil-sketch of a man who stands for nothing but himself. He swoons in his excess and stumbles on his words when to most, they mean nothing. The poets in the former Soviet Union, in
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