"We will not march back to what was, but move to what shall be..."

Biggest take away from the Inauguration of President Joe Biden? People finally speaking in complete sentences and without vicious bigoted malice.

One aspect (out of a million) missing from -45's "presidency" was the care and proper feeding of language. It was all but abused as complete sentences, complete intelligent thoughts were non-existent. Where words were devoid of truth and clarity, distorted to antagonize and gaslight, wielded as a weapon to be divisive and push misleading propaganda --- and sometimes just outright misspelled. Covfeve hamberders anyone? Like I said, abused. Some irreversible damage has been done having lying sacks of traitorous turds distort words and verbally abuse a nation day in and day out for four years, but (thankfully) today the proper use of language is on the road to restoration.

Amanda Gorman dropped the mic with her poem "The Hill We Climb", and it was the right language, the right tone to usher in Biden and Kamala Harris as our newly and legally elected president and vice president, and carry us into a difficult reassembling of our democracy. You can read the full poem here and prep a purchase of the upcoming collection where the inaugural poem will reside, but hearing Gorman speak gives the words room to really resonate. 

Gorman, who hails from Los Angeles, California and was specifically chosen by First Lady Dr. Jill Biden to speak at the inaugural, joins a small, but esteemed roster of poets who have set us onto a new path under new leadership here in the US. Yet, her being one of only five poets (and the youngest at that) to have spoken at a presidential inaugural speaks volumes about how little poetry and language as art is cherished and encouraged at the national level. We definitely need to do better. As poet laureate Rita Dove once said, "poetry is language at it's most distilled and most powerful" and in these fraught times we should look to such words like Gorman's to help guide us up and onward.

"The hill we climb 

If only we dare 

It's because being American is more than a pride we inherit

It’s the past we step into and how we repair it..."

Thomas and Beulah

"We were good, though we never believed it" 

Somehow we became the curator of the family photographs.

When a relative died, or time needed to be revisited, out came these mammoth leather-bound books and worn manila envelopes that now occupy an already stuffed secretary, awaiting my lethargic ass to get in gear and assemble them in some cohesive, chronicling fashion. Crammed in the plastic and glued atop yellowed paper is a captured history of intertwined lives, of greeting cards, of pressed flowers, of announcements, of varying faces, and its this history that I stem from.

Whenever I look at these photographs, I wander into daydreams about who these people were. Who is this man in the baseball uniform that I got my nose from? Who is this woman with the pensive stare, cascading pressed waves, and corsage who I should thank for this thick mane atop my head? Who are these light-bright girls in cotton shift dresses standing, squinting, and smiling in the Texas sun? How did they live as they did? How did they thrive in times of transition? How did they cope when the world was even a bigger ball of confusion and conflict than today? These sepia-toned images of varying sepia-toned individuals accompany stories, stories that as the years crawl and rush by are as fading as the images themselves.

Reading Thomas and Beulah by acclaimed poet laureate, Rita Dove felt as if I was rummaging through piles of family photographs, uncovering stories and recapturing a unique history. Though Dove's roots aren't mine, but her words made me feel as if it could've been, that the individuals she crafted weren't strangers.

I know a Thomas: he is my Grandfather.
I know a Beulah: she's my Granny.

It's this act of unearthing familiar familial roots that made this collection such an enriching read for me.

Thomas and Beulah is, on its face, a love story, a story that was intended to mirror the union of Dove's own maternal grandparents. These poems also double as a historical document of the Black American experience, this told through the eyes of two individuals who see the world unfold at the turn of the century, with wars, the Great Migration, and the Civil Rights Movement charting their course. Due to Dove's lyrical flair the prose cloud rolls into forming a fable, where ordinary tasks and events such as Thomas arriving by riverboat from Tennessee to a new future up North, and Beulah rearing four girls take on a mythical sheen.

Organized in two parts, the dual perspectives Dove fashions for her characters gives depth to these ordinary lives. Here we have two people who occupy a similar world and are conjoined in their biography, but both have a unique and contrasting viewpoint, and it's Dove's careful, tender wording that gives us this delicate dance between the two of them. With her enriching word meals, it's truly no wonder that this won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1987.