Poem: Until We Could

Richard Blanco is an American poet, author, and civil engineer. He is also an immigrant and a Latino. He is openly gay. He read a poem at Barack Obama's second presidential inauguration, titled "One Today". He has written many books and essays, including City of a Hundred Fires and Directions to the Beach of the Dead.

The poem can be read here: https://static1.squarespace.co...

Until We Could is a poem of his that was written in 2014, back when same-sex marriage in the USA was still illegal.  Later, the poem was adapted into a short film by "Freedom to Marry", a global movement campaign, in the same year.

The poem talks about same-sex love and the freedom to marry. The opportunity to marry someone one loves is a right, and LGBT+ people deserve to have equal rights. Same-sex marriage was legalized in the USA on June 26th 2015, but the road to equality is still long.

Being on the LGBT+ spectrum was still illegal in 72 countries by the year 2017. So their right to live normally as any other human being was nonexistent in those countries, let alone their rights to marry. And even in countries that don't make laws stating it is illegal to be LGBT+, such as Indonesia, LGBT+ people still face terrible discrimination on a regular basis.

We can only hope that the future would be kinder.