Was it real?

(Today's prompt from Writer's Digest was to write a message poem. Among the examples proposed was Jumbotron. My main experience with a Jumbotron comes from attending President Obama's inauguration -- twice.)


Flashback: January 21, 2009, Washington, DC.
The grounds of the Capitol, frozen below and swollen above with the bodies of hundreds of thousands.
Somewhere between 1.8 million and 3 million people traveled to DC to witness the swearing-in of Barack Obama as the nation's first African American president.
I was part of that crowd.
How I got there and why I was there was:
* about teaching and learning
* about grassroots democracy
* about the power of social media to connect students and others to a larger historic event.
But that's another story.
Flash forward four years.
January 20, 2013, Washington, DC.
The grounds of the Capitol, frozen below and swollen above with the bodies of hundreds of thousands.
About six hundred thousand people traveled to DC to witness the second swearing-in of Obama.
I was part of that crowd.
How and why I went back has to do with teaching and learning.
But that's another story.
Here's the message:
Snagged a gold ticket and a seat on a 6 a.m. train in-bound from Fairfax County, VA, where I was staying with my aunt .
Emerged from the ground,
Saw the dome of the Capitol glowing against a dawn-lightening sky.
Walked through security, taking pictures and posting them to Facebook,
(something that my privacy, freedom, and security friends admonished me for later).
Walked out of security and started striding as fast as I could toward those glowing domes.
The goal: get as close to the president as possible, even though I knew I wouldn't see a thing.
I found a spot, below a Jumbotron.
I would be eye-to-eye with Obama, live on the screen.