Clean Underwear

Novelist Robert Bausch said, "Saying you don’t read poetry is like saying you don’t change your underwear; it says more about you than the underwear."

With this in mind, I will not SAY that I don't read poetry, but I will admit that even though I don't SAY it, I actually don't read poetry very much. And when I do, I'm afraid I lack the patience to really absorb it. Yesterday I listened to Richard Blanco read his poem "One Today" as part of President Obama's second inauguration festivities. I believe poetry is meant to be heard as well as read, and I immediately liked the poem. I shared it with a young friend who writes poetry, and she said she liked it too. But I wondered, "Why do we like it?" And so I found the text of the poem and read it through a couple of times.

The first characteristic I noticed was that Richard Blanco chose several interesting verbs--not verbs that I had to look up in the dictionary, mind you, but words I didn't expect to hear used as verbs or words that were in some way surprising but effective in communicating his thoughts and feelings.  

I have reproduced the first two stanza's here and highlighted the verbs or verb forms I thought especially interesting.


One Today by Richard Blanco

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.

Blanco also made good use of visual and auditory images. Listen to Stanza 6:
 
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.

And then the figures of speech--similes, metaphors, personification...
"The sun...greeting the faces of the Great Lakes;...the apples, limes, and oranges arrayed like rainbows begging our praise;...and always one moon like a silent drum tapping on every rooftop and every window..."

Thank you, Richard Blanco, for making us want to read poetry.