Diane Ray
A flaw in the inauguration, otherwise perfect as its palindromic
date, the rarely formatted 1/20/2021, somehow symbolic of the rarity of this moment in time to save a nation and a planet before the clock runs out. I’m certain my bursting tears found company among the wet-eyed many when our new President Biden began to speak, we who nightmared through Trump’s four long years, culminating in the long slog through election returns and fake news challenges, on through a sitting president giving a violent coup its marching orders. Seared into memory from two weeks past, still haunted by the Confederate flag and Nazi slogans flounced through Congress, a policeman pummeled in the vise of a window, others dragged and beaten by a mob, one killed. The living cartoon of a horned, bare-chested Viking lolling about in the Speaker’s seat accompanied by fellow travelers striking Washington-crossing-the-Delaware selfie poses, whose idiocy unwittingly provided cover for the hard corps militia-trained, narrowly thwarted from carrying out far worse than the five lives sacrifice….
Demagogue-in-chief now flown, today I joined the many in hypnotic trance, reveling in wonder at history’s turned page and at long last able to freely breathe, listening to just-minted President Biden’s eloquent and timely words, proffered with his super power for compassionate reaching out to friend and former foe alike, who let fly the better angel offspring of Lincoln and St. Augustine as we witnessed American Democracy reclaimed, his speech hitting all the high notes of needed pledge to cut through the multiple thorny thickets confronting We, the People, including the spiraling overgrowth of covid virus as we brace ourselves to hack through the worst weeks yet.
Regal young poetic queen, Amanda Gorman, National Youth Poet Laureate, her hands festooning words like dancing butterflies, read rhythmically and flawlessly her deeply informed poetic tribute, and if you did not know it, you would have no idea of her valiant battle for fluent speech, who two years before could not utter the letter “r”—like the new President, a living symbol of humankind’s capacity to heal and overcome in behalf of speaking your truth.
Were you, like me, entranced by all this grace and promise, which at least for a while blinded you to the covid gaffes? When the new administration could have modeled how to easily reach for and grab the gold ring of covid safety free and clear, could have passed out cautions like socks in the mouth of normal spontaneity? Instead, we witnessed close encounters—our brand new President finishing his maskless speech, still bare faced once seated, who hugged his famously impeccable old friend, former President Obama who then held his own hug fest with a gaggle of former cronies while we tuned in from our covid spaceships, each one of us voyaging in the dark as to just what more infectious means regarding the enterprising new covid strains lurking among us while health care crisis in L.A. recently rose to the watermark for rationing of who shall have a crack at care, who shall wait eight hours in ambulance or not even score the ticket of ambulance-worthy. Why any pandemic ball drop with covid cast in the starring role of President Biden’s top priority as wily mutants stalk us from sea to shining sea?
—Submitted on 01/21/2021
Diane Ray’s work appears in Cirque, The Jewish Literary Journal, In Layman’s Terms, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Sisyphus, and other journals, as well as in anthologies including Sheltering in Place (Staring Problems Press, 2020). Ray, a native New Yorker, lives near Green Lake in Seattle and works as a psychologist.
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Editor’s Note: The series title A River Sings is borrowed from “On the Pulse of Morning,” the poem read by Maya Angelou at the first inauguration of Bill Clinton on January 20, 1993.
