"the earth torn, split open"

Richard Blanco, who read his Whitman-esque poem "One Today" at the presidential inauguration last week, is a Miami native and FIU alumnus. And like so many poets, he has a day job. He is a civil engineer. In 2008, he was involved in a road improvement project on Sunset Drive, the major artery running through downtown South Miami. While working on the project he became captivated by one of the black-and-white photographs at City Hall that depict South Miami long before his or our family arrived here. Thinking about the temporal space between himself and the single figure depicted in the photograph, he responded in poetry. Here is the text of "Photo of a Man on Sunset Drive: 1914, 2008," from the groundbreaking ceremony of the Sunset Drive road improvement project (published in 2011 in Floating Wolf Quarterly):

And so it began: the earth torn, split open

by a dirt road cutting through palmettos

and wild tamarind trees defending the land

against the sun. Beside the road, a shack

leaning into the wind, on the wooden porch,

crates of avocados and limes, white chickens

pecking at the floor boards, and a man

under the shadow of his straw hat, staring

into the camera in 1914. He doesn't know

within a lifetime the unclaimed land behind

him will be cleared of scrub and sawgrass,

the soil will be turned, made to give back

what the farmers wish, their lonely houses

will stand acres apart from one another,

jailed behind the boughs of their orchards.

He'll never buy sugar at the general store,

mail love letters at the post office, or take

a train at the depot of the town that will rise

out of hundred-million years of coral rock

on promises of paradise. He'll never ride

a Model-T puttering down the dirt road

that will be paved over, stretch farther and

farther west into the horizon, reaching for

the setting sun after which it will be named.

He can't even begin to imagine the shadows

of buildings rising taller than the palm trees,

the street lights glowing like counterfeit stars

dotting the sky above the road, the thousands

who will take the road everyday, who'll also

call this place home less than a hundred years

after the photograph of him hanging today

in City Hall as testament. He'll never meet

me, the engineer hired to transform the road

again, bring back tree shadows and birdsongs,

build another promise of another paradise

meant to last another forever. He'll never see

me, the poet standing before him, trying

to read his mind across time, wondering if

he was thinking what I'm today, both of us

looking down the road that will stretch on

for years after I too disappear into a photo.

Thanks to Pam Lahiff, chair of the South Miami Historic Preservation Board, for pointing us to this poem. The Preservation Board will host an event at South Miami City Hall Monday evening, 7pm, to introduce their new brochure, "A Walk on Historic Sunset Drive."