The room was
scattered with unfolded laundry, abandoned sports equipment, unread newspapers
and stacks of video games.
“How can y’all think
in this chaos?” I asked, stepping over shoes on my way to the kitchen.
“Shouldn’t y’all volunteer and straighten up the room?”
“We don’t have time,”
my youngest son answered.
I began to wash
dishes in the next room, but I could hear the commentators and speeches well
enough to rinse my soapy hands and dry them quickly if something interested me.
I could move closer to the television in a flash. Dirty breakfast plates and
juice glasses could wait.
I wanted to see President Barrack Obama take
the oath of office on two Bibles – one that belonged to King and another that
belonged to President Abraham Lincoln. I wanted to see what the First Lady
Michelle Obama and her children were wearing. I wanted to see the gleam of
flags and military uniforms and the sea of people on the National Mall as Kelly
Clarkson, James Taylor and Beyonce provided patriotic background music. I
wanted to be inspired.
I only allowed myself
a few glimpses of the festivities. The rest of the time, my soapy hands did
their monotonous work. I admired the blue skies over the backyards of the
neighborhood outside my window. A pet dog escaped through its doggie door to
bask in the sunshine. Steam flowed from someone’s vent as she did laundry. A
plane rumbled overhead. I heard a car start. Perhaps another mom was running to
the grocery store.
Then Richard Blanco
began to recite his inaugural poem.
“Whoever is closest
to the TV clicker, turn up the volume,” I shouted to my sons in the adjacent
room.
Weeks earlier, while I was also washing dishes, I had listened to a story broadcast on the radio about the inaugural poet. As I wiped spoons and soup bowls clean, I had thought about what an honor it would be to read a poem at such an occasion.
As a society, we listen
to sermons, speeches, songs and advertisements. But after moving past childhood
nursery rhymes and Dr. Seuss, people rarely hear poetry read aloud.
The void does us a
disservice.
Not all poetry is
difficult to understand, as many of us believe after studying abstract or
classical poems in middle school.
Billy Collins makes
me laugh out loud when he reads “The Lanyard,” a humorous poem he wrote about a
young boy who is making a gift for his mother at camp. And I can hear the music
of a girl playing her flute by the North Carolina marsh when I read Peter
Makuck’s “Fog Lifter.” King’s famous “I Have A Dream” speech also is poetic.
Words are
extraordinary. Expressing oneself through poetry is a gift. Poets can lead men
and women to action.
While Blanco started
to recite “One Today,” all fell quiet. My oldest son quit pecking on his
keyboard. My younger son stopped filing his block of wood. I, too, stepped away
from my sink. We were “one” with millions of other people worldwide listening
to a poet who wrote down his thoughts and presented his ideas quietly and
eloquently, not with shouts or shock value. He didn’t make noise. He didn’t use
crude language. He didn’t scold or blame.
He spoke poetically.
My worries about the
messy house disappeared. My son’s school project deadline didn’t loom. My other
son’s desire to win a race went idle.
For a moment, we
paused and listened.
Halfway through the
poem, my sons went back to their projects. But I listened until the last word was
said, “together.”
My inspiration had come
– not in the abbreviated form of a tweet, not in gossipy gloating or a snarky
remark on Facebook, not in a pundit’s “got to fill every silence with
something” chatter – but in the form of a poem.
Starting in the
family room, I picked up a pair of shoes and took them to the closet. I put the
unread newspapers in the magazine basket. I folded some of the laundry.
I asked my youngest
son to put away the sports equipment and my oldest son to put away the video
games.
Working together, we
started to make the room look better.
“I thank you for your
help today; the room’s now clean, let’s keep it that way,” I said and laughed
at my rhyme.
“You’re very poetic,”
my youngest son answered.
