Autumn Marathon

2009 - Very Simply and with Hope

January 1 dawned very cold here in Brooklyn and I had committed to run in the traditional New Year’s Day run of my new running club.  It was 15 degrees as I drove over to Prospect Park.  I spent part of every previous winter for the past ten years in Russia: it’s funny how quickly the human organism becomes unaccustomed to real cold.  Stretched and warmed up indoors for about an hour, then headed out to the park for a few strides followed by a fast lap of the park.  Running as fast as you can, you can initially think only about your breathing, your stride and your pace, but about a mile into the run my body went into autopilot and my mind was able to wander.

Hard not to think on the first day of the year about the new presidential administration and the challenges it faces.  I also thought about the inaugural ceremony itself, just over two weeks hence, which will bring unprecedented crowds to my birth city, Washington DC, and how many inaugurations have taken place on similarly frigid days.  Barack Obama is resuming the tradition of having a poet read at his ceremony and the person he has chosen, Elizabeth Alexander, is an aquaintance from school days in Washington DC.

I thought about the previous inaugural poets – Robert Frost (1960), Maya Angelou (1992) and Miller Williams (1996).   Frost was probably the most famous and quickly became identified with the Kennedy administration.  His effort, The Gift Outright, was stiff and formal. Maya Angelou’s. On the  Pulse of the Morning was called “politically correct” for it’s shout-outs to the various races/ethnicities of the US.  I personally loved it – it made a huge impression on me when I watched the 1993 inauguration on TV in Bogota, Colombia.  The poem gets more stirring as it goes on – the final verse is particularly good; but I was surprised when I watched the excerpt from the inaugural cermony again on YouTube recently how restrained and almost academic Angelou’s reading was.  The critics liked Miller Williams effort, On History and Hope, read at Clinton’s second inauguration.  The poem has some great lines:

We have memorized America,
how it was born and who we have been and where.

but I don’t remember much about the reading, only that I was watching on that January day.  There’s not much to quote there.

Back home after finishing the run, I scanned Angelou’s poem and offer the final stanza as my invocation for 2009:

Here on the pulse of this new day

You may have the grace to look up and out

And into your sister’s eyes, into

Your brother’s face, your country

And say simply

Very simply

With hope

Good morning.