One Today

The poem is written in free verse, the most common form of poetry in the contemporary era. It therefore has no regular meter and does not employ rhyme. The lines are generally long, from 10 to 17 syllables for the most part; almost the only exception is at the end, when three of the last four lines are much shorter. The sentences are mostly long; the nine lines that comprise Stanza 2 comprise just two sentences. Since the lines and sentences are long, the poem makes use of caesura—a pause within a line indicated by a punctuation mark, in this case a comma, colon, period, or em dash (a long dash). Blanco particularly favors the colon; there are colons in six of the nine stanzas, which often introduce lists of multiple people or things as the US collectively goes about its day. One notable thing about the punctuation is that there is no final period after the last line. This conveys the open-endedness of the American enterprise; there is no limit to how it can grow and develop in every positive way.