How fitting that Richard Blanco chose the sun.
A 44-year-old poet raised in Miami, the first Cuban-American and the first openly gay person ever to deliver a presidential inauguration poem, he used the earth star to frame his composition, “One Today,” at the Jan. 21 ceremony before the U.S. Capitol. Blanco found poetic significance in tracing the many disparate American lives, the truck drivers and schoolchildren, the waitpersons and accountants, upon whom it sheds light during its daily trek across the sky.
But there’s another reason Blanco’s choice made sense. The dawn is the symbolic beginning of the new day and thus, the symbolic end of the old.
Keep that in mind as people parse Barack Obama’s second inaugural address. Keep it in mind as they debate What It All Means that he has adopted a more combative stance toward Republicans in Congress, that he sang the praises of liberal values, that he apparently became the first president in history to take a stand for — or even mention — gay rights during an inaugural address. Keep it in mind as Republicans piously declaim Obama’s failure to seek common ground with them, conveniently forgetting that every time over the last four years the president reached a hand out to them, he drew back a nub.
Keep it in mind, because Blanco was, perhaps, righter than he knew when he invoked an inclusive new American dawn, with its implied farewell to an exclusionary American yesterday.