When I was born here in Gulfport in 1966, my parents' interracial marriage was still illegal. And it was very hard to drive around town with my parents, to be out in public with my parents.

The act of making poetry is an act of hope.

I don't like a kind of workshop that is about editing--I don't want to sit there and be an editor. I don't want to tell someone how to "fix" a poem.

The experience of poetry could bring my mother back to me. Poetry offers a different kind of solace - here on earth.

I was deeply moved by Richard Blanco's reading of his inaugural poem-a timely and elegant tribute to the great diversity of American experience. And now comes this fine meditation on his experience of coming to poetry, of making the poem and the months surrounding its making-a testament to the strength and significance of poetry in American culture, something not always seen or easily measured. Today Is For All of Us, One Today is a necessary intervention into the ongoing conversation about the role of poetry in public life.

What is love?/ One name for it is knowledge.

First, I emptied the closets of your clothes, threw out the bowl of fruit, bruised from your touch, left empty the jars you bought for preserves. The next morning, birds rustled the fruit trees, and later when I twisted a ripe fig loose from its stem, I found it half eaten, the other side already rotting, or-like another I plucked and split open-being taken from the inside: a swarm of insects hollowing it. I'm too late, again, another space emptied by loss. Tomorrow, the bowl I have yet to fill.