My sister Maria Mazziotti
Gillan at a reading in December 2012 at the Poetry Center with the 2013
Inaugural Poet Richard Blanco - www.mdmazz.com The Art of Healing
1/25/2013
The full text of the poem:
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
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 cafe 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
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.
by
Richard Blanco
The text of the poem was provided by the
Presidential Inaugural Committee.