As the Fourth of July weekend draws to a close, today’s poem, by Richard Blanco, invites us to explore the word “country.” In “Using Country in a Sentence,” Blanco offers a liberatingly expansive, boundary-dissolving meditation on how much more than “nation” the word might mean.
Blanco is the fifth presidential inaugural poet in U.S. history – the youngest and first Latino, immigrant and gay person to serve in such a role. His latest book of poems, “How to Love a Country” (Beacon Press, 2019), both interrogates the American narrative, past and present, and celebrates the still unkept promise of its ideals. He lives with his partner in Bethel.
Using Country in a Sentence
By Richard Blanco
My chair is country to my desk. The empty page
is country to my life-long question of country
turning like a grain of sand irritating my mind, still
hoping for some pearly answer. My question
is country to my imagination, reimagining country,
not as our stoic eagle, but as wind, the country
its feathers and bones must muster to soar, eye
its kill of mice. The wind’s country as the clouds
it chisels into hieroglyphs to write its voice across
blank skies. A mountain as country to the clouds
that crown and hail its peak, then drift, betray it
for some other majesty. No matter how tall
mountains may rise, they’re bound to the country
that raises them and grinds them back into
earth, a borderless country to its rooted armies
of trees standing as sentinel, their branches
country to every leaf, each one a tiny country
to every drop of rain it holds like a breath
for a moment, then must let go. Rain’s country,
the sea from which it’s exiled into the sky
as vapor. The sky an infinite, universal country,
its citizens the tumultuous stars turning
like a kaleidoscope above my rooftop and me
tonight. My glass as country to the wine I sip,
my lips country to my thoughts on the half moon
—a country of light against shadow, like ink
against paper, my hand as country to my fingers,
to my words asking if my home is the only
country I need to have, or if my country is the only
home I have to need. And I write: country—
end it with a question mark. Lay my pen to rest.
Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Using Country in a Sentence,” from “How to Love a Country: Poems by Richard Blanco,” copyright © 2019 by Richard Blanco. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press, Boston.
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