Call Us What We Carry

by Amanda Gorman

Anxiety is a living body, Poised beside us like a shadow. It is the last creature standing, The only beast who loves us Enough to stay.

By Hello, we mean: Let us not say goodbye again. There is someone we would die for. Feel that fierce, unshifting truth, That braced & ready sacrifice. That’s what love does: It makes a fact faced beyond fear. We have lost too much to lose. We lean against each other again, The way water bleeds into itself. This glassed hour, paused, Bursts like a loaded star, Belonging always to us. What more must we believe in.

There is power in being robbed & still choosing to dance.

We might not be fully sure of all that we are. & yet we have endured all that we were.

This is to say, there does exist A good grief. The hurt is how we know We are alive & awake; It clears us for all the exquisite, Excruciating enormities to come. We are pierced new by the turning Forward.

What we carry means we survive, It is what survives us. We have survived us. Where once we were alone, Now we are beside ourselves. Where once we were barbed & brutal as blades, Now we can only imagine.

Hope is the soft bird We send across the sea To see if this earth is still home. We ask you honestly: Is it?

Lost as we feel, there is no better Compass than compassion. We find ourselves not by being The most seen, but the most seeing. We watch a toddler Freewheel through warm grass, Not fleeing, just running, the way rivers do, For it is in their unfettered nature. We smile, our whole face cleared By that single dazzling thing. How could we not be altered.

EVERY DAY WE ARE LEARNING Every day we are learning How to live with essence, not ease. How to move with haste, never hate. How to leave this pain that is beyond us Behind us. Just like a skill or any art, We cannot possess hope without practicing it. It is the most fundamental craft we demand of ourselves.

Really reminds me of the harris-walz messaging

Life is not what is promised, But what is sought. These bones, not what is found, But what we’ve fought. Our truth, not what we said, But what we thought. Our lesson, all we have taken & all we have brought.

To care is how we vow That we are here, That we are. It is how we break Free.

When we tell a story, We are living Memory.

Storytelling is the way that unarticulated memory becomes art, becomes artifact, becomes fact, becomes felt again, becomes free. Empires have been raised & razed on much less. There is nothing so agonizing, or so dangerous, as memory unexpressed, unexplored, unexplained & unexploded. Grief is the grenade that always goes off.

In this one life, we, like our joy, are fleeting but certain, abstract & absolute, ghosts who glow & glow.

It’s said that ignorance is bliss. Ignorance is this: a vine that sneaks up a tree, killing not by poison, but by blocking out its light.

The first step to scapegoating a whole people is to delegitimize their value—to call them a host to nothing but horror.

The oppressor will always say the oppressed want their overcrowded cage, cozy & comforting as it is; the master will claim that the slaves’ chains were un-derstood, good, all right, okay—that is to say, not chains at all.

To be kept to the edges of existence is the inheritance of the marginalized.

But the point of protest isn’t winning; It’s holding fast to the promise of freedom, Even when fast victory is not promised.

So when you’re told that your rage is reactionary, Remind yourself that rage is our right. It teaches us it is time to fight. In the face of injustice, Not only is anger natural, but necessary, Because it helps carry us to our destination. Our goal is never revenge, just restoration. Not dominance, just dignity. Not fear, just freedom. Just justice.

Again, language matters. Children have been taught— America: without her, democracy fails. But the truth is: America without her democracy fails.

RESOLUTE This rush of peace runs So deep it roots us to the spot. It is true that poetry Can lamp an era scraped hollow, A year we barely swallowed. There is a justice in joy, Starlit against all that We have ended, endured & Entered. We will not stir stones. We shall make mountains.

We do not hope for no reason. Hope is the reason for itself.