One Today by Richard Blanco

Poem written for the inauguration of President Barack Obama's second term.

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

Our Greatest Fear by Marianne Williamson

It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.

Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant,
gorgeous, talented and fabulous?

Actually, who are you not to be?

You are a child of God.

Your playing small does not serve the world.

There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other
people won't feel insecure around you.

We were born to make manifest the glory
of God that is within us.

It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone.

And as we let our own light shine,
we unconsciously give other people
permission to do the same.

As we are liberated from our own fear,
our presence automatically liberates others.

Forgetfulness by Billy Collins

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

Dear Reader by Billy Collins

Baudelaire considers you his brother, and Fielding calls out to you every few paragraphs as if to make sure you have not closed the book, and now I am summoning you up again, attentive ghost, dark silent figure standing in the doorway of these words.

Oracle by Seamus Heaney

Hide in the hollow trunk
of the willow tree,
its listening familiar,
until, as usual, they
cuckoo your name
across the fields.
You can hear them
draw the poles of stiles
as they approach
calling you out:
small mouth and ear
in a woody cleft,
lobe and larynx
of the mossy places.

the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls by e. e. cummings

the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls
are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds
(also, with the church's protestant blessings
daughters, unscented shapeless spirited)
they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead,
are invariably interested in so many things--
at the present writing one still finds
delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles?
perhaps. While permanent faces coyly bandy
scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D
....the Cambridge ladies do not care, above
Cambridge if sometimes in its box of
sky lavender and cornerless, the
moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy

When the World As We Knew It Ended by Joy Harjo

We were dreaming on an occupied island at the farthest edge
of a trembling nation when it went down.

Two towers rose up from the east island of commerce and touched
the sky. Men walked on the moon. Oil was sucked dry
by two brothers. Then it went down. Swallowed
by a fire dragon, by oil and fear.
Eaten whole.

It was coming.

We had been watching since the eve of the missionaries in their
long and solemn clothes, to see what would happen.

We saw it
from the kitchen window over the sink
as we made coffee, cooked rice and
potatoes, enough for an army.

We saw it all, as we changed diapers and fed
the babies. We saw it,
through the branches
of the knowledgeable tree
through the snags of stars, through
the sun and storms from our knees
was we bathed and washed
the floors.

The conference of the birds warned us, as they flew over
destroyers in the harbor, parked there since the first takeover.
It was by their song and talk we knew when to rise
when to look out the window
to the commotion going on--
the magnetic field thrown off by grief.

We heard it.
The racket in every corner of the world. As
the hunger for war rose up in those who would steal to be president
to be king or emperor, to own the trees, stones, and everything
else that moved about the earth, inside the earth
and above it.

We knew it was coming, tasted the winds who gathered intelligence
from each leaf and flower, from every mountain, sea
and desert, from every prayer and song all over this tiny universe
floating in the skies of infinite
being.

And then it was over, this world we had grown to love
for its sweet grasses, for the many-colored horses
and fishes, for the shimmering possibilities
while dreaming.

But then there were the seeds to plant and the babies
who needed milk and comforting, and someone
picked up a guitar or ukulele from the rubble
and begin to sing about the light flutter
the kick beneath the skin of the earth
we felt there, beneath us

a warm animal
a song being born between the legs of her,
a poem.

Let Me Die a Youngman's Death by Roger McGough

Let me die a youngman's death
not a clean and in between
the sheets holy water death
not a famous-last-words
peaceful out of breath death

When I'm 73
and in constant good humour
may I be mown down at dawn
by a bright red sports car
on my way home
from an all night party

Or when I'm 91
with silver hair
and sitting in a barber's chair
may rival gangsters
with ham fisted tommy guns burst in
and give me a short back and insides

Or when I'm 104
and banned from the Cavern
may my mistress
catching me in bed with her daughter
and fearing for her son
cut me up into little pieces
and throw away every piece but one

Let me die a youngman's death
not a free from sin tiptoe in
candle wax and waning death
not a curtains drawn by angels borne
'what a nice way to go' death

And Then There Is California by Jennifer L. Knox

“There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience.
And then there is California.” —Edward Albee

The horizon gutted, skinned, unfurled
and dried like a diamondback, no secrets,
no secret sea cave stash, so evident it all seems
invisible: fissures in the orange San Andreas,
smoking asphalt on a runaway go-cart, 100%
clear skies in Funky Town, Manson said,
“There’s no slack in my act.” Mercury spread
so see-through thin, see this on the other side:

a girl dribbling gas into a fresh-empty 40
out on 10th and Ave. K: for the broke-down
Maverick or her friends to huff? Soon barefoot
before the swift, black aqueduct, nearly naked,
the parrot motif adorning her panties aquafies
her little butt peacockishly, but way cooler,
more Mexican—sudden color in a blinding
field of beige. The animals all live underground,
people shoot at nothing—water, the hills.

A Miracle for Breakfast by Elizabeth Bishop

At six o'clock we were waiting for coffee,
waiting for coffee and the charitable crumb
that was going to be served from a certain balcony
--like kings of old, or like a miracle.
It was still dark. One foot of the sun
steadied itself on a long ripple in the river.

The first ferry of the day had just crossed the river.
It was so cold we hoped that the coffee
would be very hot, seeing that the sun
was not going to warm us; and that the crumb
would be a loaf each, buttered, by a miracle.
At seven a man stepped out on the balcony.

He stood for a minute alone on the balcony
looking over our heads toward the river.
A servant handed him the makings of a miracle,
consisting of one lone cup of coffee
and one roll, which he proceeded to crumb,
his head, so to speak, in the clouds--along with the sun.

Was the man crazy? What under the sun
was he trying to do, up there on his balcony!
Each man received one rather hard crumb,
which some flicked scornfully into the river,
and, in a cup, one drop of the coffee.
Some of us stood around, waiting for the miracle.

I can tell what I saw next; it was not a miracle.
A beautiful villa stood in the sun
and from its doors came the smell of hot coffee.
In front, a baroque white plaster balcony
added by birds, who nest along the river,
--I saw it with one eye close to the crumb--

and galleries and marble chambers. My crumb
my mansion, made for me by a miracle,
through ages, by insects, birds, and the river
working the stone. Every day, in the sun,
at breakfast time I sit on my balcony
with my feet up, and drink gallons of coffee.

We licked up the crumb and swallowed the coffee.
A window across the river caught the sun
as if the miracle were working, on the wrong balcony.

Stars by Mary Oliver

Here in my head, language
Keeps making its tiny noises.

How can I hope to be friends
with the hard white stars

whose flaring and hissing are not speech
but a pure radiance?

How can I hope to be friends
with the yawning spaces between them

where nothing, ever, is spoken?
Tonight, at the edge of the field,

I stood very still, and looked up,
and tried to be empty of words.

What joy was it, that almost found me?
What amiable peace?

Then it was over, the wind
roused up in the oak trees behind me

and I fell back, easily.
Earth has a hundred thousand pure contraltos--

even the distant night bird
as it talks threat, as it talks love

over the cold, black fields.
Once, deep in the woods,

I found the white skull of a bear
and it was utterly silent--

and once a river otter, in a steel trap,
and it too was utterly silent.

What can we do
but keep on breathing in and out,

modest and willing, and in our places?
Listen, listen, I'm forever saying,

Listen to the river, to the hawk, to the hoof
to the mockingbird, to the jack-in-the-pulpit--

then I come up with a few words, like a gift.
Even as now.

Even as the darkness has remained the pure, deep darkness.
Even as the stars have twirled a little, while I stood here,

looking up,
one hot sentence after another.

After Persephone by Tracy K. Smith

At a certain point, it didn't matter.
I commanded him to lead.
Farther. So far I was no longer me
Long before I was no longer safe.

I shed everything, save being.
There is a moment, even in the face
Of defeat, when the chase alone
Is enough. I lived quickly,

My whole life disappearing
From around me like a sound
That rises into the air and is gone
Without even an echo. After song

There is a pang. The heart in clench.
Then memory. Then retreat
Into the present. That silence.
Not emptiness, but weight.

I felt my steps marking the space
Where I must tread. Then it was I
Who led. Dragging us both
Into his world. It was real. More real

Even than what came after.

A Form Of Women by Robert Creeley

I have come far enough
from where I was not before
to have seen the things
looking in at me from through the open door

and have walked tonight
by myself
to see the moonlight
and see it as trees

and shapes more fearful
because I feared
what I did not know
but have wanted to know.

My face is my own, I thought.
But you have seen it
turn into a thousand years.
I watched you cry.

I could not touch you.
I wanted very much to
touch you
but could not.

If it is dark
when this is given to you,
have care for its content
when the moon shines.

My face is my own.
My hands are my own.
My mouth is my own
but I am not.

Moon, moon,
when you leave me alone
all the darkness is
an utter blackness,

a pit of fear,
a stench,
hands unreasonable
never to touch.

But I love you.
Do you love me.
What to say
when you see me.

The Dark-Light of Spring by Eric Leigh

I.

The stars were once just a handful
of rock salt on the black ice of the drive,
but my father had a need

for his sons to know major from minor,
pattern from mess. So we stayed the course
of winter nights, parroting the words he gave:

Cancer, Gemini, Cassiopeia.
The fog of his breath rolling over us:
Big Dipper, Little Dipper, Belt of Orion.

That year in school I learned mnemonic devices,
how the constellations were yarns once spun
to recall direction, when to reap or to sow,

and my father came home
each night to a tale all his own:
Laz-E Boy, meatloaf, vodka martini.

My mother faded to background
in the heat of his light. This was months
before the supernova of divorce

eclipsed all of us, and the universe cooled
to a spring in which I helped my brother
tape a glow-in-the-dark map

of the night sky to his wall.
How we learned to pull tight
the curtains and turn off the lights.

With enough ambition, any day could be
made dark, any sky could tell you the story
you needed most to hear.

II.

Two years ago, the undertaker shook my hand
and said, "Mourning is a romance

in reverse"—I still can't get my mind
around it, but I know he's dead-

on right. As my father laid hands-folded
in a pinstripe suit, I never loved him more,

that man who used to chase me around
the house, the belt still warm from his waist.

Now his face runs alongside ads
for backhoe rentals and used pickups

in the memoriam my uncle has placed
in a local rag, turned into bookmarks,

and sent to my brother and myself, as if
we don't already mark our place

by where he used to be, chart our course
by the North Star of the bullet

he fired through his own heart
twenty-four months ago today.

Anniversaries keep track of us
as much as we do of them.

Each year another plot point,
another thumbtack on the map

showing where we've been since
those funeral days when strangers

held us close, apologized for our loss,
as they struggled to anchor

letter to letter, word to sentence,
to forge their way like each of us must

to say something, anything,
when nothing is enough.

III.

That day when we entered the house
of our father, we did so
as strangers—

no key in hand or under mat,
the door left open by police—
and the first thing we saw

was a bullet hole through the family
room wall. We crossed over then
into this other world,

went cartoon as the fat wallop of bat
made contact with skull,
stars circling round,

our inheritance, a dis-
ordered sky. What to make of it?
For his part, my brother turned

each trash can out for what
it could reveal, as I pressed my face
against the blast hole

and stared into our father's room:
magazines on the nightstand
in even rows, the bed

so neatly made. In the aftermath,
everything was evidence,
sorted into piles

of keep or pitch, save or throw.
How we worked in silence,
dumping drawers

into Glad bags and stacking them
on the porch, where we collected
ourselves at dusk.

It was only then we realized
we'd spent all day in failing
light,

never turned on a single lamp,
the whole house counting down
to the same black

of the plastic pooled at our feet.
As we stared out across the corn,
the sun stoked

its last coal and my brother brought
the visor of his hand
to brow. Instinctively,

I did the same, as if we could see
how close we were
to him, how far.

IV.

My brother is calling because I'm the only one who knows
how this week opens and closes, bound by the sturdy
hinge of loss that never wears thin. Our father is dead

another year and what is there to do but go on
making small talk about what we've heard from home:
the sickness and health, the impending demolition.

Seems the vote came in, the word came down and the old
department store is next. The only class
that factory town ever had will soon be dust—

workers already packing her with charges,
engineers calculating how each wall will give,
how ten floors will fall next Sunday afternoon.

When the coast is clear, the urge to grieve will be followed
by the impulse to forget. One day soon,
the empty spot on the skyline will mean nothing

to the newly arrived. So it is with mourning.
No one knows we're missing him until we say it.
Friends apologize. Strangers buy us a drink. Each kindness

is a depth charge sounding out the limits of the space
he used to hold. As always, what is not said is more
important than what is. The store of which we speak

is the same one where our father bought us our first suits,
led us through the ritual of tailoring, the magic
of a stranger making something from our measurements,

all so we could be confirmed in a church
that never really fit—their heaven too small a place
in comparison to sky. In Brooklyn, it's already dark

and though their days are numbered, my brother says he can
still make out the twins of Gemini. An old story
but one my father loved: Castor and Pollux,

one brother so unable to live without the other
that their father placed them side-by-side in the sky.
What he didn't share was this: the truth about stars

in the truth about men. Brothers. Us.
You can draw a line between two bodies
be it ink or blood, but that doesn't bring them any closer

together. Proximity can be a trick of the light, intimacy
an ever-fluxing span. Still, when we hang up,
he says he loves me with the same stilted voice

my father got each time he said goodbye—
a small and sudden comfort, that certain words
still turn a man all thumbs. As sure as salt, as stars.

V.

The wind took the last of him long ago,
but dead fathers make for stubborn ghosts,
and ours is no exception.

The first year I couldn't cry
or drink fast enough to kill what was
left of him. And now I pull out his things

just to put them away, unable to summon
him from wreckage: his belt and wallet,
a few service medallions.

Only when I'm half-asleep
can I come close
to assembling his face.

"Horseshoes and hand grenades,"
my father always said, meaning close
but no cigar. Clichés were his home

remedy. "If it don't kill you. . ." his favorite
cure-all, sermon on the mount.
One lesson he didn't teach:

If you rub too hard at the last remains
of sleep or tears, a galaxy will blossom
underneath your lids—dark-light they call it,

the neural white noise of the eye,
twin skies that contain the only stars
I can convince to form the lines

of his forehead, his Coke-bottle glasses.
Still, certain features refuse to be drawn—
the frown of his moustache, his work-

worn hands. Some stories can't be told
in stars, each detail a too-distant light
that must be magnified

under the lens of memory,
which only knows to give in
equal proportion to what it takes away.

Dawn by William Carlos Williams

Ecstatic bird songs pound
the hollow vastness of the sky
with metallic clinkings--
beating color up into it
at a far edge,--beating it, beating it
with rising, triumphant ardor,--
stirring it into warmth,
quickening in it a spreading change,--
bursting wildly against it as
dividing the horizon, a heavy sun
lifts himself--is lifted--
bit by bit above the edge
of things,--runs free at last
out into the open--!lumbering
glorified in full release upward--
songs cease.

The Long Jump as Teleportation by Quan Barry

Mexico City, 1968

It only allows itself to be glimpsed.

Though there are prerequisites: the night like a bell jar, the air rarefied & thin.

Because the shortest distance between two points is both memory & forgetting--
00how we remember the moon of the green corn lurching over the sea, sky
00gone the color of absence

& we are there again--the catamaran's ambient listing. Or

the story of one epileptic's diagnosis--art history, how the professor seemed "to blip"
00about the hall, the lecture like an old film w/ frames missing.

Point A. Point B. The hang time in the air. The becoming.

Though it only allows itself to be glimpsed, there is a runway of indeterminate length.

You must think of yourself as both there & gone, arms like a wheel.

If the atmospherics are right, there will be a moment like a broken mirror:
00you will see yourself in a thousand rooms at once, legs airborne
00& desperately pedaling.

Call this consciousness. Call this pure awareness--the being
00focused like a beam.

Because sometimes you can want something too much, there is always a threshold
00& a place to fall.

How many feet to tranquility? How far must we leap until we never look back?

I don't need to know anymore.

Once I was there & then I wasn't.

A Red Palm by Gary Soto

You're in this dream of cotton plants.
You raise a hoe, swing, and the first weeds
Fall with a sigh. You take another step,
Chop, and the sigh comes again,
Until you yourself are breathing that way
With each step, a sigh that will follow you into town.

That's hours later. The sun is a red blister
Coming up in your palm. Your back is strong,
Young, not yet the broken chair
In an abandoned school of dry spiders.
Dust settles on your forehead, dirt
Smiles under each fingernail.
You chop, step, and by the end of the first row,
You can buy one splendid fish for wife
And three sons. Another row, another fish,
Until you have enough and move on to milk,
Bread, meat. Ten hours and the cupboards creak.
You can rest in the back yard under a tree.
Your hands twitch on your lap,
Not unlike the fish on a pier or the bottom
Of a boat. You drink iced tea. The minutes jerk
Like flies.

It's dusk, now night,
And the lights in your home are on.
That costs money, yellow light
In the kitchen. That's thirty steps,
You say to your hands,
Now shaped into binoculars.
You could raise them to your eyes:
You were a fool in school, now look at you.
You're a giant among cotton plants.
Now you see your oldest boy, also running.
Papa, he says, it's time to come in.
You pull him into your lap
And ask, What's forty times nine?
He knows as well as you, and you smile.
The wind makes peace with the trees,
The stars strike themselves in the dark.
You get up and walk with the sigh of cotton plants.
You go to sleep with a red sun on your palm,
The sore light you see when you first stir in bed.

Seascape by Stephen Spender

In memoriam M.A.S

There are some days the happy ocean lies
Like an unfingered harp, below the land.
Afternoon guilds all the silent wires
Into a burning music for the eyes
On mirrors flashing between fine-strung fires
The shore, heaped up with roses, horses, spires
Wanders on water tall above ribbed sand.

The motionlessness of the hot sky tires
And a sigh, like a woman's from inland,
Brushes the instrument with shadowy hand
Drawing across those wires some gull's sharp cry
Or bell, or shout, from distant, hedged-in, shires;
These, deep as anchors, the hushing wave buries.

Then from the shore, two zig-zag butterflies
Like errant dog-roses cross the bright strand
Spiralling over waves in dizzy gyres
Until the fall in wet reflected skies.
They drown. Fishermen understand
Such wings sunk in such ritual sacrifice.

Remembering legends of undersea, drowned cities.
What voyagers, oh what heroes, flamed like pyres
With helmets plumed have set forth from some island
And them the seas engulfed. Their eyes
Distorted to the cruel waves desires,
Glitter with coins through the tide scarcely scanned,
While, far above, that harp assumes their sighs.

Balances by Nikki Giovanni

in life
one is always
balancing

like we juggle our mothers
against our fathers

or one teacher
against another
(only to balance our grade average)

3 grains of salt
to one ounce truth

our sweet black essence
or the funky honkies down the street

and lately i've begun wondering
if you're trying to tell me something

we used to talk all night
and do things alone together

and i've begun

(as a reaction to a feeling)
to balance
the pleasure of loneliness
against the pain
of loving you

Dogfish by Mary Oliver

Some kind of relaxed and beautiful thing
kept flickering in with the tide
and looking around.
Black as a fisherman's boot,
with a white belly.

If you asked for a picture I would have to draw a smile
under the perfectly round eyes and above the chin,
which was rough
as a thousand sharpened nails.

And you know
what a smile means,
don't you?

§

I wanted the past to go away, I wanted
to leave it, like another country; I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,

whoever I was, I was

alive
for a little while.

§

It was evening, and no longer summer.
Three small fish, I don't know what they were,
huddled in the highest ripples
as it came swimming in again, effortless, the whole body
one gesture, one black sleeve
that could fit easily around
the bodies of three small fish.

§

Also I wanted
to be able to love. And we all know
how that one goes,
don't we?

Slowly

§

the dogfish tore open the soft basins of water.

§

You don't want to hear the story
of my life, and anyway
I don't want to tell it, I want to listen

to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.

And anyway it's the same old story–
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.

Mostly, I want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind,
or mean,
for a simple reason.

And nobody gets out of it, having to
swim through the fires to stay in
this world.

§

And look! look! look! I think those little fish
better wake up and dash themselves away
from the hopeless future that is
bulging toward them.


And probably,
if they don't waste time
looking for an easier world,

they can do it.