Cuban-American poet Richard Blanco read a poem at the reopened United States Embassy in Havana in an effort to encourage compromise between the US and Cuba, according to the Associated Press.

The poem, “Matters of the Sea,” calls on the people of the United States and Cuba “to breathe together, to heal together.”

About the poem, Blanco told the Associated Press: “It was the easiest poem and the hardest poem to write. In some ways all of my body of work has circled around this idea of cultural identity and negotiation of this sense of home.”

Blanco, who was President Obama’s inaugural poet in 2013, himself came to the United States with his Cuba-exiled parents from Spain when he was an infant; he was raised in Miami.

In a conversation with Robert Siegel of NPR, Blanco discussed how he felt about being commissioned to write a new poem for the reopening of the US Embassy. He explained that his inspiration for the poem came from thinking about the ninety-mile separation between the two countries.

“I started thinking about that and how to make that something not about separation, but about unification,” he said. “And so it’s the sea that separates us, but it’s also the sea that unites us.”

“Here I am, this bridge between the American side and the Cuban side. My hope was somehow that my word would continue to strengthen that bridge, to strengthen a conversation.”

Photo credit: Chip Somodevilla - Getty Images