Seeing Light in Richard Blanco's Inaugural Poem for Obama

Hi friends of reading and writing,

I have been thinking about seeing this week, even before hearing the poem Richard Blanco read for Obama's second presidential inauguration.  My weekly idea to chew over and live with is that we can only see through light, that we mainly learn to "see" aka understand by our visual sense, and that it can both convince us and mislead us.  We can see and understand something only because it's presented to our eyes, illuminated in light.  But also, we can use vision to fool others (think of magicians, for example, or people who try to make you think they're something they are not.)

So Blanco, following the light of a day from sunrise to the newest constellation awaiting our creative response in the evening, taps into these thoughts.  He shows us concrete objects like the shoes without which he could not have gone to school, traces the role of his parents' sacrifices in providing them, but gives all that in a fleeting glance aside from the whole flow of society.  We each see and understand things that are part of the river of society, and depend on light to let us intepret them.  I highly recommend this poem to you.  You can find it in Hector Tobar's LA Times piece.

cheers,
Laura

PS Photo from Creative Commons with thanks to photographer Till Credner.