Sun Exhaling Light

“[...] But let’s not start with tears, or the flashing lights, the sirens, nor the faint voice over the cell phone when you heard ‘I love you ...’ for the very last time. No, let’s ease our way into this, let our first lines praise the plenitude of morning, the sun exhaling light into the clouds. [...]” —Richard Blanco, from “One Pulse – One Poem” On June 12, 2016, a man shot and killed 49 people and wounded 58 others in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Richard Blanco’s “One Pulse – One Poem”, a stirring reaction to this atrocity, depicts the poet–observer trying to come to terms with the reality of the event. Inviting the reader to join him in calm commiseration, he counsels us to first take stock in our surroundings – in the quiet beauty of our natural and built environment – before joining him in attempting to find the words to express the horror that such an act of violence elicits. Sun Exhaling Light takes this premise as its starting point. Solar wind is a stream of charged particles emitted by the Sun. It buffets our planet constantly, Earth’s magnetosphere our only protection against the intense radiation that would inflict severe damage on all life. One can imagine these competing forces as a metaphor for the conflict between the drive to aggression and the protective shield that is human civilization. The piece envisions scenarios in which our culturally constructed defences are eroded, bursts of violence tearing through, leaving us stunned and deeply mournful. The title Sun Exhaling Light is taken from the poem "One Pulse – One Poem" by Richard Blanco, used with permission of the author. Excerpt from the poem reprinted with permission; ©2016, Richard Blanco.