Coda

Abstract

Near the end of Barack Obama’s second presidential inauguration ceremony on January 21, 2013, Cuban American poet Richard Blanco stepped to the podium at the US Capitol to recite “One Today,” a poem he had composed especially for the occasion. In the course of the next six minutes, he delivered an uplifting Whitmanesque ode that praises Americans’ unmatched work ethic (“hands gleaning coal or planting windmills,” “hands/digging trenches, routing pipes and cables, hands/as worn as my father’s cutting sugarcane”), celebrates their linguistic diversity (“the doors we open/for each other all day, saying: hellol shalom,/buon giorno Lhowdy Lnamaste for buenos di as/in the language my mother taught me”), and proclaims their expansionist spirit (“all of us—facing the stars/hope—and new constellation/waiting for us to map it,/waiting for us to name it—together”). ¹ Although Blanco never mentions the United States by name, “One Today” contains enough geographical and historical references (the Great Lakes, the Great Plains, the Rockies, Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, 9/11, the recent Newtown elementary school massacre) to suggest that the context is meant to be strictly national. Indeed, Blanco’s vision seems almost chauvinistic in its singular focus on America and its lack of acknowledgement of other forms of social belonging. Even the autobiographical component in the poem is subsumed by the national ideology.