Too Bright to Read

A Poetry Tale about Robert Frost, told by Hello Doggo.

The twentieth of January, nineteen sixty-one. Washington had been buried in snow the night before. Now the sun was out, hard and bright, bouncing off every white surface on Capitol Hill.

Into that glare stepped Robert Frost. Eighty-six years old. The first poet ever to read at a presidential inauguration.

He’d written a new poem for the day, called Dedication, and had it typed up. He began to read it. And he couldn’t see it. The wind worried the pages. The light bleached the typing to nothing. He faltered, and started again.

Lyndon Johnson, the new vice president, tried to shade the paper with his hat. It didn’t help.

So Frost gave up on the paper, and did what old poets do. He recited from memory. An older poem, The Gift Outright, the one Kennedy had asked for in the first place. Clear and steady. And at the end, by most accounts, he nudged a word for the new president, so the country was no longer what she would become, but what she will become.

Here’s what lingers. The poem he never got through ended with a promise: a golden age of poetry and power, of which this noonday’s the beginning hour. Frost died two years later. Kennedy, not ten months after that.

And Frost had already written the footnote, almost forty years before. Nothing gold can stay.