It's pretty enough, but ultimately without fire.
KS
On 22 January 2013 01:03, Douglas Barbour <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Yeah, well, he is an engineer (I think he said on PBS the other night).
>
> You can't expect a really interesting poem on such occasions, can you?
>
> Doug
> On 2013-01-21, at 3:07 PM, Max Richards <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> > Miami-raised Cuban poet Richard Blanco delivered his poem “One Today,”
> written especially for the inauguration ceremony. The full text is below:
> >
> > One Today
> >
> > One sun rose on us today, kindled over our shores, peeking over the
> Smokies, greeting the faces
> > of the Great Lakes, spreading a simple truth
> > across the Great Plains, then charging across the Rockies. One light,
> waking up rooftops, under each one, a story told by our silent gestures
> moving behind windows.
> >
> > My face, your face, millions of faces in morning’s mirrors, each one
> yawning to life, crescendoing into our day: pencil-yellow school buses, the
> rhythm of traffic lights,
> > fruit stands: apples, limes, and oranges arrayed like rainbows begging
> our praise. Silver trucks heavy with oil or paper— bricks or milk, teeming
> over highways alongside us,
> >
> > on our way to clean tables, read ledgers, or save lives— to teach
> geometry, or ring-up groceries as my mother did for twenty years, so I
> could write this poem.
> >
> > All of us as vital as the one light we move through,
> > the same light on blackboards with lessons for the day: equations to
> solve, history to question, or atoms imagined, the “I have a dream” we keep
> dreaming,
> > or the impossible vocabulary of sorrow that won’t explain the empty
> desks of twenty children marked absent
> > today, and forever. Many prayers, but one light
> > breathing color into stained glass windows,
> > life into the faces of bronze statues, warmth
> > onto the steps of our museums and park benches 2
> > as mothers watch children slide into the day.
> >
> > One ground. Our ground, rooting us to every stalk
> > of corn, every head of wheat sown by sweat
> > and hands, hands gleaning coal or planting windmills in deserts and
> hilltops that keep us warm, hands digging trenches, routing pipes and
> cables, hands
> >
> > as worn as my father’s cutting sugarcane
> > so my brother and I could have books and shoes.
> >
> > The dust of farms and deserts, cities and plains mingled by one wind—our
> breath. Breathe. Hear it through the day’s gorgeous din of honking cabs,
> buses launching down avenues, the symphony
> >
> > of footsteps, guitars, and screeching subways, the unexpected song bird
> on your clothes line.
> >
> > Hear: squeaky playground swings, trains whistling,
> >
> > or whispers across café tables, Hear: the doors we open for each other
> all day, saying: hello| shalom,
> > buon giorno |howdy |namaste |or buenos días
> > in the language my mother taught me—in every language spoken into one
> wind carrying our lives
> >
> > without prejudice, as these words break from my lips.
> >
> > One sky: since the Appalachians and Sierras claimed their majesty, and
> the Mississippi and Colorado worked their way to the sea. Thank the work of
> our hands: weaving steel into bridges, finishing one more report for the
> boss on time, stitching another wound 3
> > or uniform, the first brush stroke on a portrait,
> > or the last floor on the Freedom Tower
> > jutting into a sky that yields to our resilience.
> >
> > One sky, toward which we sometimes lift our eyes tired from work: some
> days guessing at the weather of our lives, some days giving thanks for a
> love that loves you back, sometimes praising a mother who knew how to give,
> or forgiving a father
> >
> > who couldn’t give what you wanted.
> >
> > We head home: through the gloss of rain or weight
> > of snow, or the plum blush of dusk, but always—home, always under one
> sky, our sky. And always one moon like a silent drum tapping on every
> rooftop
> > and every window, of one country—all of us—
> > facing the stars
> > hope—a new constellation
> > waiting for us to map it,
> > waiting for us to name it—together
> >
> >
> >
> http://www.salon.com/2013/01/21/one_sun_rose_on_us_today/?source=newsletter
> >
> > - strikes me as sort of 1930s Whitmanesque
> > but likely to be warmed to by millions…
> >
> > Max
>
> Douglas Barbour
> [log in to unmask]
>
> Recent publications: (With Sheila E Murphy) Continuations & Continuation 2
> (UofAPress).
> Recording Dates (Rubicon Press).
>
> Something else is out there
> godamnit
>
> And I want to hear it
>
> C.D.Wright
>
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