Video Chat: Richard Blanco – Poet, Author, Civil Engineer
Posted by Elman + Perez-Trujillo
Selected by President Barack Obama as the fifth inaugural poet in U.S. history, Richard Blanco joined the ranks of such luminary...
Read MoreNEWS FROM RICHARD BLANCO
Richard Blanco Poem in The New Yorker (Feb 11 edition)
By Jessica Barrios
Richard Blanco, FIU alum and Inaugural Poet for President Obama’s second inauguration, had his poem, “My Father in English,” published in the February 11th edition of The New Yorker. The poem, a tribute to his late father, describes the challenges his father faced when he moved from Cuba to the United States and started to integrate English into his everyday life. “Indeed did indeed become his favorite word, which, like the rest of his new life, he never quite grasped: overused and misused often to my embarrassment,” said Blanco in the poem. “Yet the word I most learned to love and know him through: indeed.” The one verse poem includes a mix of Spanish words like “las montañas,” ”alma,” and “buenos dias,” which Blanco italicizes along with the word “indeed” to show how crucial the word has become to his father. Culture and family are recurring themes in Blanco’s work and drive the plot of his poems. His new poetry collection “How to Love a Country” will be published in March. Click here to read Blanco’s poem on The New Yorker website (or listen to Blanco read it). I'm pleased to share a new poem with you below. It's a preview from BOUNDARIES, my just-released collaboration with photographer Jacob Hessler, published as a limited edition of 300 signed copies by Two Ponds Press. Honored to be part of this beautiful art/poetry book that challenges the dividing lines of race, gender, class, and ethnicity. For more info, visit https://www.twopondspress.com/boundaries
DREAMING A WALL
He hates his neighbors’ flowers, claims his
are redder, bluer, whiter than theirs, believes
his bees work harder, his soil richer, blacker.
He hears birds sing sweeter in his trees, taller
and fuller, too, but not enough to screen out
the nameless faces next door that he calls
liars, thieves who’d steal his juicier fruit, kill
for his wetter rain and brighter sun. He keeps
a steely eye on them, mocks the too cheery
colors of their homes, too small and too close
to his own, painted white, with room to spare.
He curses the giggles of their children always
barefoot in the yard, chasing their yappy dogs.
He wishes them dead. Closes his blinds. Refuses
to let light from their windows pollute his eyes
with their lives. Denies their silhouettes dining
at the kitchen table, laughing in the living room,
the goodnight kisses through every bedroom.
Slouched in his couch, grumbling over the news
he dismisses as fake, he changes the channel
to an old cowboy Western. Amid the clamor
of gunshots he dozes off thinking of his dream
where he stakes a line between him and all
his neighbors, stabs the ground as he would
their chests. Forms a footing cast in blood-red
earth, bends steel bars as he would their bones
with his bare fists and buries them in concrete.
Mortar mixed thick with anger, each brick laid
heavy with revenge, he smiles as he finishes
the last course high enough to imagine them
more miserable and lonely than him alone
inside his wall, sitting on his greener lawn,
breathing his fresher air, under his bluer sky.