When he was a 19-year-old sophomore at Occidental College, two of Barack Obama’s poems — “Underground” and “Pop” —
found their way into the spring 1981 edition of the college’s literary magazine, Feast. The poem that interested me most was “Pop,” a poem that I correctly deduced was about Obama’s mentor, the communist pornographer Frank Marshall Davis. I overlooked the poem “Underground,” however, and may have misjudged it.
UNDERGROUND
Under water grottos, caverns
Filled with apes
That eat figs.
Stepping on the figs
That the apes
Eat, they crunch.
The apes howl, bare
Their fangs, dance,
Tumble in the
Rushing water,
Musty, wet pelts
Glistening in the blue.
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