One Today ~ 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.

~ first stanza from One Today by Richard Blanco

Words can bring us together or split us apart. As the inaugural poet for 2013, Richard Blanco brings us together with his poem, One Today. I recently attended his workshop and keynote at the Sanibel Island Writer’s Conference (which was not on Sanibel Island due to hurricane damage in 2022, but that’s another story).

This Writer’s Conference celebrates stories in the written word. When I go to “Storytelling Festivals,” the word “Storytelling” (with a capital ‘S’) refers to the oral tradition of spoken stories. While the literal act of “telling stories” requires speech, the word “storytelling” is often used figuratively in most other circles. Just to add to the confusion of terms, after I perform a story someone will ask, “Did you write that?”

At the Writer’s Conference, I was able to get a taste of other creative fields that “tell stories” (figuratively) through other modes of expression like screen writing, novels, flash fiction, and poetry. The workshops inspired my creativity as I worked with these new mediums: painting scenes in poetry and molding the clay of plot in flash fiction. These have already helped me in crafting my own oral stories. However, Richard Blanco also inspired me by his life story.

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.

~ second stanza from One Today by Richard Blanco

His words remind me of my own mother and father, their sacrifices so that I could go to college, become a doctor, teach at a university… so I could write my own stories… so I could write this blog. As Richard Blanco celebrates his family and their struggle as immigrants to this country from Cuba, I think of my own parents migrating from Jamaica. The love for his parents creeps into the slow cadence of his voice, the faint smile, the distant gaze. I too am transported with the nostalgia of his poetry and the pain of things left behind.

Richard Blanco is an engineer that became a poet. Yet, he did not give up one for the other. He continues to work as an engineer, even as he has become a celebrated poet, winner of the National Humanities Award, poet-laureate of Miami, and many other awards. When asked about his work as a civil engineer, he loves his work and would not give it up. He has carved out space for poetry in his life by finding a balance with his engineering career. He gave up climbing the corporate ladder in engineering, but he excels in the job that he has carved out for himself. He has even taken his poetry into his engineering life, commissioned to write and read poems. He is an engineer and a poet.

It is important to see yourself mirrored out there in the world. One of many millions of faces looking back at you, wordlessly acknowledging that you belong, and opening you up to a world of possibilities. For me, Richard Blanco reflects back that I can be a physician and a storyteller. One can inform the other, and each make space for the other. These diverging roads can merge in some way in that future that I cannot know, but only partly imagine.

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.

~ third stanza from One Today by Richard Blanco

I dream of many things–some that I can barely imagine, some that will never come true, some that have died. However, I also dream of hope for the future–doctors that tell healing stories, engineers that are poets, communities that come together, love and family. Sometimes I see those dreams reflected back in the poetry and faces of others. Thank you, Richard Blanco, for helping to keep my dreams alive.

Read the full inaugural poem, One Today, by Richard Blanco:

• One Today on poets.org
• About Richard Blanco
• More Books by Richard Blanco