SCRIPT:

Ladies and Gentlemen [and Otherwise Described…]

The President of the United States

My friends.

I had intended to speak to you tonight about love.

A subject that contains both a point of departure 

and a destination because it is itself a way.

A way shown to any who have in time transmuted the venom of this place.

A way shown to any who know that grief forestalled grows its heft into a crushing wave.

A way shown to those who have felt the shock of grace in the form of an offered hand, a healing word, or a willing sacrifice on their behalf.

Love is a way that plunges us into the crest of that wave, knowing full well that whether it shall drown or cleanse it will certainly strip us bare of all illusion.

Together.

Love is a way that recognizes that none of us are spared from the inexorable flow of time.

Love is a way that knows we are offered to one another now.

I had intended to speak to you of love, when a question came to me.

What if this is our last night?

What if this is our last night?

So much energy expended to extend the day.

To press back shadow with filament or wick.

To block safe eyes from unspared suffering.

So much expended to secure the few, to tend their comforts, and patch their paradises.

Those sealed havens are tombs in wait.

So this night I say pinch out the flame, walk outside.

Our eyes adjust and we can feel the pulse and hum of sentient life.

Pollution may well block your view but set your eyes skyward.

Consider the constellations and the black pull that binds and spins them.

Consider the expanding expanse.

And the kind of time that views all that ever was here, 

every named thing and unnamed precedent 

as glint in the blink of an eye.

Consider what has been close and biting will soon be flung out into space.

If this is our last night

Will we spend it with our fists clenched tight?

Will we measure the worth of our rules of engagement?

Weigh past defenses and assaults?

If this is our last night 

I wonder… will you join me?

Stretching out our hands

To grab the flag

That symbol fraught with rage and hope

To pull its binding threads

To cup and catch the red-striped blood

And pour it back to Earth

To pry the long white jutting bones

Then spoke them in a circle on the ground

As testimony of the costs 

Then one by one unhook the fifty

From their field of satin blue

And pause

Together now beneath the open sky

Revealed by unraveled threads

Our stacks of stars in tow

I have no use for allies now

Allies born of nations born of empires born of greed born of fear

Only lovers now

Lovers who burn false treaties and notions of possession 

in the fire of their risk

Unguarded and unsure

beneath the deepened sky

Together now 

Our stacks of stars in tow

I speak to you at last of love

That great black pull that binds and spins

Revealed in this unravelling time

And ask you, friends.

What way will you make with the light in your hands?