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Richard Blanco

Richard Blanco Biography

Poet

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“To love a country as if you’ve lost one: as if it were you on a plane departing from America forever, clouds closing like curtains on your country, the last scene in which you’re a madman scribbling the names of your favorite flowers, trees, and birds you’d never see again, your address and phone number you’d never use again, the color of your father’s eyes, your mother’s hair, terrified you could forget these. To love a country as if I was my mother last spring hobbling, insisting I help her climb all the way up to the U.S. Capitol, as if she were here before you today instead of me, explaining her tears, cheeks pink as the cherry blossoms coloring the air that day when she stopped, turned to me, and said: You know, mijo, it isn’t where you’re born that matters, it’s where you choose to die—that’s your country.”

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Book:How to Love a Country
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“How could you, America? With no answer for all I knew of country was my hurt and rage. But home was home: I dusted off the secrets, cleaned up the lies, nailed the creaky floors down, set a fire, and sat with history books I’d never opened, listened to songs I’d never played, pulled out the old map from a dark drawer, redrew it with more colors, less lines. I stoked the fire, burning on until finally: Okay, nothing’s perfect, I understood, I forgive you, I said—and forgiveness became my country.”

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Book:How to Love a Country
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“We're the cure for the hatred caused by despair. We’re the good morning of a bus driver who remembers our name, the tattooed man who gives up his seat on the subway. We’re every door held open with a smile when we look into each other’s eyes the way we behold the moon. We’re the moon. We’re the promise of one people, one breath declaring to one another: I see you. I need you. I am you.”

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Book:How to Love a Country
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“These contrasts were also meant to reflect the essential beauty and constant struggle of our democracy as expressed in our nation’s motto: e pluribus unum (out of many, one). We are a populace of individual “I’s” who have consented to come together as a “we.” The challenge has been to continuously question who is (or isn’t) included in that “we” and how to redefine and reimagine it. Overall, we’ve managed to move toward a more inclusive understanding of ourselves and acceptance of each another. Historically, though, we have wavered and are currently at a crossroads: Are we going to advance toward a broader definition of “we” or will we retreat to a narrower one?”

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Book:How to Love a Country
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“Write one more stanza—now. Set the page ablaze with the anger in the hollow ache of our bones— anger for the new hate, same as the old kind of hate for the wrong skin color, for the accent in a voice, for the love of those we’re not supposed to love. Anger for the voice of politics armed with lies, fear that holds democracy at gunpoint.”

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Book:How to Love a Country
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“How I still want to sing despite all the truth of our wars and our gunshots ringing louder than our school bells, our politicians smiling lies at the mic, the deadlock of our divided voices shouting over each other instead of singing together. How I want to sing again-- beautiful or not, just to be harmony--from sea to shining sea--with the only country I know enough to know how to sing for.”

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Book:How to Love a Country
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“I had been thinking about the question, "What do I love about America?" I kept coming back to this idea of community and home, which already obsessed me in my work. But I couldn't quite figure out how to lead beyond my immediate experience. Then I was just standing at the kitchen sink, and I watched the sun rise, and I thought, "How many hundreds of thousands of people are watching the same sun rise right now?" I just knew the poem would go from that line.”

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Author:Richard Blanco
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