This Shared Forest
Around 2pm on January 20, 2021, finding myself distracted by relief, optimism and a little “what now?” anxiety, I went for a walk in the woods above my house.
As I climbed the hill into the woods, my head was full of Amanda Gorman’s poem, “The Hill We Climb.”
Did you know that there have only been six inaugural poets in the 245 year history of the United States? I didn’t until yesterday.
The first was Robert Frost, chosen by John F. Kennedy in 1961. That makes 185 years of our republic before a poet was brought onto the ultimate civic platform. The next, Maya Angelou, didn’t take the stage until 1993. She was selected by Bill Clinton, who again turned to a poet in 1997 with Miller Williams. Barack Obama chose two, Elizabeth Alexander in 2009 and Richard Blanco in 2013. Amanda Gorman is our sixth and youngest inaugural poet.
When I begin to despair for the slow march that is progress in a democracy, I will remind myself that, of these 6 poets, 3 are Black women. Richard Blanco was the first Latinx and openly gay inaugural poet. In other words, more than half of our inaugural poets are not white men.
It’s fitting that Robert Frost would be first, as he’s a monumental American poet of the old order, up there with Whitman and Dickinson. The story behind his inaugural appearance is really very interesting.
Sadly the poem itself is not.
I love Robert Frost’s poems. I carry a book of his as one of a few sacred objects every time I travel. That said, his inaugural poem, chosen by Kennedy after Frost turned down the request to write an original, “The Gift Outright,” is 16 lines of pure Manifest Destiny delusion. It is the kind of poem written by a white man of Frost’s stock in Frost’s time, big on European American destiny and little on… anybody else. I won’t dwell on its faults today.
At 2 pm on a late January afternoon, the sun lays everything bare. It cuts at such an angle that everything seems differently illuminated. More lit than even in the summer. The woods are quite naked, and as I walked through them on Wednesday I could see farther than I’d ever seen before.
Along the hilltop, about 20 yards off the trail, stands a very old, very gnarled oak. I’d never noticed it before, but as it caught my eye on that afternoon, it made me think of Robert Frost. Wizened, knuckled, flawed and bent in upon itself. Rooted in past deep enough to call history. Witness to ages of weather, to years upon years of comings and goings. Deeply American in its way.
I thought of Amanda Gorman. I imagined her as a young larch, brilliant in its winter yellow, standing close by.
Two trees, one ancient and deeply set, the other young and bursting with growth and irrepressible life.
As different as you can imagine, and yet set in the same earth and reaching toward the same sun. Sharing nutrients. Susceptible to the same fires, the same lightning, the same developer’s axe.
These two poets: so different but not so different. Separated by race, experience and eras, but united in art, in care for the common good, in the courage to uncover a piece of their soul, to share it and, in doing so, reveal its oneness with all our own.
The metaphor lover in me is tempted now to say, “what does it matter if you’re a cedar and I’m a maple and there’s a suspicious-looking stand of dogwoods over there if we might all be riven by same saw?” But, people are not trees. The metaphor does not hold. We build our own sawmills. Start our own fires.
Yes, we are in a time of great division and little apparent commonality. Two roads long ago diverged in America, and they can feel too distant from one another and too different to converge again. Wednesday, January 20 did not magically heal this. We are a nation divided into halves, we are a prickly, rancorous bunch — that seems to be our one shared trait.
What is true, and what does hold, is that we share this place — this forest or republic, this America, this planet. Our common lot is the suchness of humanity. But we are not all alike. And we do not all want the same things or value the same things.
What thing in us, what deep characteristic can we tap into that you and I share? How can we find our common goal for the common good?
Here is what our inaugural poets have said.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living
Lift up your eyes upon
This day breaking for you.
Give birth again
To the dream.
Women, children, men,
Take it into the palms of your hands,
Mold it into the shape of your most
Private need. Sculpt it into
The image of your most public self.
Lift up your hearts
Each new hour holds new chances
For a new beginning.
Do not be wedded forever
To fear, yoked eternally
To brutishness.
But how do we fashion the future? Who can say how
except in the minds of those who will call it Now?
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.
Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here
We head home: through the gloss of rain or weight
of snow, or the plum blush of dusk, but always—home,
always under one sky, our sky. And always one moon
like a silent drum tapping on every rooftop
and every window, of one country—all of us
And Amanda Gorman:
And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us, but what stands before us.
We close the divide because we know, to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside.
We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another.
We seek harm to none and harmony for all.
Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true:
That even as we grieved, we grew.
That even as we hurt, we hoped.
That even as we tired, we tried.
That we’ll forever be tied together, victorious.
Not because we will never again know defeat, but because we will never again sow division.
What are the common characteristics among these poems? We. Us. The overcoming of fear. Honoring of the past. The molding of the future as work undertaken together, in unity.
This isn’t about pandering to conspiracy theories or making nice with white nationalists. It’s about de-escalation and reconciliation, which involves shared taking of responsibility. It’s about building a future of shared honor for shared humanity. We know politics hasn’t healed the division. Social media and the news certainly haven’t.
But Art creates dialogue. It changes hearts. It builds empathy. It builds community.
None of us has the answer to what will unify us. But we all can ask the questions. That is what art must do. We must ask the questions. We must tell the stories and draw the common threads. And we must model a future to which everyone can aspire.
We must honor our ancestors, our dead, our living, and our future generations by collectively finding a way to move forward, together, through this shared forest.
