de maíz, a cada espiga de trigo sembrados con sudor
y manos, manos que cosechan carbón o plantan molinos de viento
en los desiertos y las colinas para darnos calor, manos
que cavan zanjas, trazan tuberías y cables, manos
tan gastadas como las de mi padre que cortaban caña
para que mi hermano y yo tuviéramos libros y zapatos.
El polvo de nuestras granjas y desiertos, ciudades y planicies
mezclado por un mismo viento—nuestro aliento. Respira. Escúchalo
en el hermoso estruendo del día: los taxis y su claxon,
autobuses disparados por las avenidas, la sinfonía
de los pasos, guitarras y el chirrido del metro,
el inesperado pájaro cantor en tu tendedero.
Escucha: columpios chillones, trenes que silban,
o murmullos en los cafés. Escucha: las puertas
que abrimos todo el día: hello / shalom /
buon giorno / howdy / namaste / o buenos días
en el idioma que mi madre me enseñó—en todos los idiomas
hablados al mismo viento que lleva nuestras vidas sin
prejuicio, mientras estas palabras parten de mis labios.
Un mismo cielo: desde que los Apalaches y las Sierras reclamaron
su majestad, y el Misisipí y el Colorado labraron
su camino hasta el mar. Agradece el trabajo de nuestras manos:
que tejen el hierro en puentes, terminan un reporte más
para el jefe, cosen otra herida o uniforme, la primer pincelada
de un retrato, el último piso de la Torre de la Libertad
resaltado en un cielo que cede ante nuestra resiliencia.
El mismo cielo hacia el cual a veces levantamos la mirada,
cansados de trabajar: unos días adivinamos el clima
de nuestra vida, otros días agradecemos un amor
que nos ama de vuelta, unas veces alabamos a una madre
que supo darnos más que todo, otras veces perdonamos
a un padre que no pudo dar lo que queríamos.
Volvemos a casa: a través del brillo de la lluvia, o el peso
de la nieve, o el rubor del atardecer, pero siempre, siempre
a casa, siempre debajo de ese cielo, nuestro cielo. Y siempre
una misma luna como tambor callado golpeteando en todos los techos
y en cada ventana de un país—todos nosotros—
de cara a las estrellas. La esperanza—una nueva constelación aguarda
que la tracemos, aguarda que la nombremos—juntos.
When I finish, there is dead silence, and for a moment I think, Well, I better not quit my day job yet. Later I will realize this is because of the sound delay. But a second or two after I turn from the podium, I hear applause and cheers from the crowd behind me, while facing a standing ovation from those on the platform, including the president and vice president, who shake my hand again.
As I make my way back down the aisle, I scan smiles of approval and eyes filled with a reverent glee. Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor gives me a nod. James Taylor reaches into the aisle, touches my arm, and whispers, Great job, man. Despite the praise, I’m overwhelmed by the magnitude of the moment, caught in a complexity of emotions: feeling a great sense of accomplishment and yet simply grateful that I didn’t trip over the steps or my words; filled with pride and yet bashful from all the attention; anxious about how the poem went over and yet perfectly at ease knowing that I had done my very best and given the assignment—and my country—all I had to give.
. . . all of us—facing the stars
On my way to the holding room, I see Alison wanting to skip down the hall and do a cartwheel—I can tell from the glee in her eyes. Without saying a word, she embraces me, and I pick her up, spin her through the air in my arms. Back in the room, I and my village of highly educated and respected professionals, who had worked so hard and seamlessly, know we’ve earned the right to celebrate unabashedly and get just plain silly in a private moment belonging to us, solely to us. Intoxicated with joy (and relief), we bounce around the room that can hardly contain our jubilation, hugging each other and making toasts with orange juice and water bottles. David wraps his scarf around me and we break into a conga step. Nikki darts around the room reporting the tweets coming in: “Oh my god, you’re trending worldwide! Oh my god, you’re ahead of Beyoncé!” All this being caught by Mark, snapping a photo every three seconds, recording the eternal moment being born inside us. My mother, in a stoic loss for words, asks me where the bathroom is, and in the same breath tells me she loves me and asks me to sit with her for a moment.
We spill back into the hall buzzing with people, where we meet Myrlie Evers-Williams, Rev. Dr. Luis León, James Taylor, Kelly Clarkson—all of us in electrified celebration. There are more handshakes, hugs, and mutual words of congratulations and praise. Then we hear from Beyoncé’s entourage that she wants to meet the poet, and we are escorted into her holding room. She tells me how much she enjoyed the poem. I thank her, compliment her on her performance, and ask, “Were you as nervous as I was?” thinking that surely a superstar such as she wouldn’t be. But she was, she says, and tells me that at least she was singing someone else’s song; she couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for me to read something I wrote myself. Beyoncé is gracious and genuine, and to answer the question I will get asked dozens of times: Yes, she is just as beautiful in person.
Mark and I are bused to the official presidential grandstand, where I soon after meet the vice president’s brother, Frank Biden, waiting in line for hot chocolate. He shares with me that my poem was the talk of the afternoon luncheon with the president and Congress. The woman tending the hot-chocolate stand overhears us. Oh you’re the poet, she smiles and shares the story of her mother—an immigrant like my mother—who came from the Ukraine and worked in a factory in New York City into her seventies. Others at the parade introduce themselves and offer congratulations. Some say it was the best moment of the inauguration for them. I am flattered by everyone’s comments and responses, but it’s a much more complex feeling, difficult to explain exactly. A kind of mutual gratitude, a moment shared in one joy of simultaneous giving and receiving.
After the parade, as Mark and I walk through the streets trying to find our designated shuttle bus back to the hotel, people begin recognizing me as the poet. They stop me, share snippets of their responses to the poem: I felt like part of America for real. . . . It was as if you were speaking to me. . . . It made me cry. . . . Thank you, thank you. We take pictures together, they tell me about their lives, their stories. Some are teachers, firemen, lawyers; other are secretaries, accountants, housekeepers—the same people that live in “One Today,” I realize. They ask how they can get copies of the poem for their children, students, grandmothers, and neighbors. A petite Asian-American woman darts out of an alley, kisses me, and insists I sign her copy of the inaugural program. A ten-foot-tall doorman grabs me in a bear hug and says, Come here—give me some love, brother. I had wanted to embrace America through “One Today”; I wanted Americans to embrace each other. But I hadn’t expected that America would embrace me and that the poem would be gifted back to me in such a way.
Mark and I become completely disoriented; we have no idea how to get back to the hotel. Most of the streets are closed; there are no cabs in sight, and we have about an hour to get ready for the inaugural ball. A woman—an angel—appears on a corner. She stares at me in amazement, as if she has been looking for me, and says, I knew I would find you. She hugs me and introduces herself as Lara, a psychologist and writer. After we explain our predicament, she says, Well, I got a car—I’ll give you a ride. We climb into her Toyota, her golden retriever Rusty growling at Mark in the back seat. On the way to the hotel we talk about Einstein, quantum physics, love, the source of creativity, and “One Today,” as if we have known each other all our lives. I promise to try to get her into the inaugural ball, but I ne
ver see the angel again.
Similar interludes and exchanges continue through the hotel lobby and in the elevator. In the hall on the way to our room I take pictures with some of the housekeeping staff, and we begin chatting in Spanish. I ask them where they are from and they ask me where I am from, which suddenly feels like a whole different question to me after the inauguration. Mark pulls me into the room; we shower, change into our tuxedoes in twenty minutes, then meet the others in the lobby and head to the inaugural ball in a caravan of taxis.
I had thought I was going to have a ball at the ball, maybe even get a chance to dance with the First Lady or have a quiet moment with the president to ask him what he thought of the poem and how I was selected. Not so. Soon after we arrive, I realize the grand scale of the inaugural ball: thousands of people from all over the country and the world. Not an intimate setting, but an intimate feeling nevertheless. Despite the fact that most are strangers to each other, there’s a sense of belonging to each other, a common motive for celebration, a oneness, much like at the inauguration, much like the poem.
Before the president arrives, and I realize I won’t meet him, we dash to the CNN studios for an interview with Anderson Cooper, whom I had long admired for his work and courage for leading an openly gay life. I’m a little starstruck when we meet, but he is the same person as he appears on television: gracious, friendly, genuinely intrigued—and a great interviewer who makes me feel at ease, as if I’m simply chatting in his living room. From the CNN studios we rush off to the Human Rights Campaign ball. The organizers had told everyone I wasn’t going to attend; they had wanted my appearance to be a surprise, and it is, for me as well: I walk onstage to say a few words, but I’m silenced by three minutes of whistles, applause, and hollers. Though I have lived an openly gay life for decades, I came of age in a generation fraught with homophobia. As such, I think there was still some small part of me that hadn’t fully accepted myself as a gay man until that very moment when I am overcome by the crowd’s response, the palpable love from my LGBT community. Not a town or a city but a home nevertheless, where I belong as much as I belong to America.
. . . a new constellation . . .
More interviews are scheduled for early the next morning. We call it a night, and my village reconvenes in my hotel room. We slip off our shoes, brew some tea, and begin a round-robin reading of the thousands of e-mails and Facebook messages we received throughout the day and which are still coming in. Messages from senior citizens and schoolchildren, from foreign nationals and New Englanders who were alive to see Frost read his poem, from gay and straight soldiers and parents, from prominent Latinos and those as salt-of-the-earth as my mother and father, from members of Congress and immigrant families from all over the globe. The messages are like poems. They speak of their tears and hand holding as they listened to the poem, their sense of belonging and healing, their pride and hope, their lives and Americanness. As a poet, I’ve been schooled to never conjure up clichéd imagery, but there is no other way to say this: we stumble over words blurred by our tears, at times our voices surrender to silence as the only fitting homage to the pure, uncensored honesty we feel unworthy to read aloud.
Throughout the next day, before leaving Washington, I continue living and breathing these messages. They reconfirm my belief in poetry as a mirror, able to affect and enhance lives, but they also call to mind my long-held concerns about the state of poetry in America. Why isn’t poetry a part of our cultural lives and conversations; part of our popular folklore as with film, music, and novels? I suddenly remember my first trip to Cuba, when I tell my cousins and uncles that I’m a poet, and they take out their guitars, a bottle of moonshine rum, and ask me to “sing with them.” I don’t understand what they mean. They begin strumming and singing to the moon in Spanish through impromptu décimas, a syllabic and rhymed poetic form. Most of my relatives have a high school education at best, and yet they know poetry; they know their national poets and can quote verses from Nicolás Guillén, José Lezama Lima, and José Martí, who to this day is considered a Cuban national hero referred to as the “Apostle.” Poetry is entrenched in their history, rooted in their folklore, established in their national identity and their very lives.
Reflecting back on my own life, I realize that all throughout grade school, high school, and college I was never introduced to a single poem by a living poet. Unacceptable. Not until I began taking creative writing courses on my own after college did I encounter the incredible spectrum of contemporary poets writing about the very communities and issues of my day. Poetry then became alive and relevant to my life. Why hadn’t that happened sooner? I think of all the middle school children I’ve worked with over the years, how their eyes light up when we read and discuss poetry that mirrors their own families, neighborhoods, lives, and experiences.
The messages from my country speak clearly to me of the great potential and hope for poetry in America. In a visionary moment, I know the greater good that must come from my honor as inaugural poet. I make a conscious commitment to keep connecting America with poetry and reshape how we think about it, to try to dispel the myths and misconceptions about the art by introducing us to more contemporary work that speaks to our lives in real time. And, moreover, to explore how I can empower educators to teach contemporary poetry and foster a new generation of poetry readers. I think again about Sandy Hook, those children who died, but also those children and parents who survived them. I know there is poetry that can help them process their grief, make sense of the senseless, find a way to heal, and believe the sun is a sunflower again.
. . . waiting for us to map it . . .
to name it—together
Nestled in our seats at the Airport, Mark and I wait to board our flight back home. We’re still electrified but too exhausted to even speak. All we can do is quietly watch the mass of people herding through the terminal: businessmen in suits clutching their iPads or military men in uniform lugging their duffle bags, women in pantsuits or mothers pushing their strollers, everyone in the act of leaving or returning, in the mystic flux of journey. The public-address system sounds like an oracle, announcing flights, calling out passenger names and their destinations. And it all feels strangely familiar, old yet new, sharp yet dull, bright yet muted, like those few minutes some mornings in bed with half my life still in a dream and the other half of me being born anew into the miracle of yet another morning. The end of one story inexplicably transitioning into another.
It’s the first opportunity I have to truly sit quietly for a moment and reflect on the whole experience of the inauguration with a little distance. I’m again struck with a knowing that nothing will ever be the same, though I’m not sure what those changes and experiences will be or how they will indeed prove to me that poetry can have a place and power in our contemporary lives, like no other art form.
It’s about thirty minutes before our departure time. I don’t know that in a few months I will interview with the editors of the Newtowner, an arts and literature magazine from Newtown, Connecticut. We will plan classroom visits and a special event on the anniversary of the Sandy Hook tragedy to bring the community together in poetry and healing, as I had wanted to do since the day it happened, since the day I penned “One Today” to remember those children forever. I don’t know of the thousands of people who will stir my soul through letters I will receive, each one sharing a life changed by their reflection in “One Today” or my other poems, enthused by a rekindled or newfound love for poetry. I don’t know that in May I’ll meet President Obama in the Oval Office and we will speak about his and the First Lady’s ongoing commitment to poetry. I will present the president with Sergio’s beautiful broadside of “One Today,” which he’ll hang in his back office where he’ll say he keeps those things closest to him.
The boarding process begins. I get in line, but I don’t know of the Boston Marathon bombings, the boy and two young women whose lost lives I’ll feel compelled to immortalize in “Boston Strong,�
� an occasional poem I’ll write and read before tens of thousands of people at the opening of a concert at Boston’s TD Garden to benefit the survivors and victims’ families. Imagine, a poem (in America) as an opening act—so to speak—for James Taylor, Jimmy Buffett, Carole King, the Backstreet Boys, Aerosmith, and other artists who will come together for the cause. Imagine poetry being able to make a difference alongside them. A few weeks later I’ll read the same poem again in Fenway Park before a Red Sox game: baseball, hot dogs, poetry, and apple pie—why not? I don’t know that I will also be asked to write and read another occasional poem for the Tech Museum of Innovation at their annual awards gala in Santa Clara, California. Poetry in Silicon Valley—why not?
I fasten my seatbelt as instructed without knowing that in June the Supreme Court will rule the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional in favor of Edith Windsor, and I will team up with the Freedom to Marry organization to write a love poem commemorating a ten-year struggle for marriage equality. I can’t imagine a poet—much less me—will be the grand marshal of the gay pride parade in Portland, Maine. I don’t know that I will speak at Portland’s Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project, read poems and sing “God Bless America” like I never have before alongside Somali and Congolese, whose stories of and love for this country would be as epic as my mother’s. I can’t fathom that a poet—much less me—will be honored with keys to the cities of Portland, Miami, and Miami Beach. I don’t know that I’ll again be in the company of celebrities such as Taylor Swift at the Fragrance Foundation Awards in New York’s Lincoln Center, where I will read a poem I wrote, “To the Artists of the Invisible,” blending the romance of scents with the sense of words. Perfume and poetry—why not?
The plane pushes back from the gate, but I don’t know about the grade school and high school teachers from around the country who will send me hundreds of poems, drawings, and letters by their students, inspired and given hope by “One Today.” I do not know that I will be asked to read and share my story and poems at a conference of engineers, one of whom will stand up and confess to everyone in the room that he’s been writing poetry for years to make sense of his life. As I have. I do not know that after a poetry reading on Cape Cod a woman will embrace me and recite a line from one of my poems (. . . pretend that nothing lost, is lost) as tears well up in her eyes because she can’t help pretending she hasn’t lost the son she’d lost just a few months ago. Nor have I met the woman in Vermont who will tell me she keeps a copy of “One Today” on her kitchen table and reads it on those days she feels she can’t go on. I’ll tell her poetry is what keeps me going, too. Nor has the elderly man from Buffalo confided in me that he’s written into his will that “One Today” be read at his funeral. I’ll remember my own wish to have Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” read when I die.
For All of Us, One Today Page 6
