Call Us What We Carry

by Amanda Gorman

To be accountable we must render an account: Not what was said, but what was meant.

Sloshing with millions of lonely, An overcrowded solitude. We pray there will never be such a Precise & peopled hurt as this.

The language we spoke Had no place for excited, Eager, laughter, joy, Friend, get together.

We teach children: Leave a mark on the world. What leads a man to shoot up Souls but the desire to mark Up the globe?

Kids, unmark this place. Leave it nothing Like the one we left behind.

There was another gap that choked us: The simple gift of farewell.

Goodbye, by which we say to another— Thanks for offering your life into mine. By Goodbye, we truly mean: Let us be able to say hello again.

We slept the days down. We wept the year away, Frayed & afraid.

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

What we have lived Remains indecipherable. & yet we remain. & still, we write. & so, we write. Watch us move above the fog Like a promontory at dusk. Shall this leave us bitter? Or better? Grieve. Then choose.

There is no right way to say How we have missed one another.

We issue an apology From our warbling palms: We are still hurt, But for now, we no longer hurt One another. There is no meek way to mend. You must ruin us carefully.

GOOD GRIEF

We often say: We are beside ourselves with grief. We can’t even imagine. This means anguish can call us to envision More than what we believed was carriable Or even survivable. 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.

All that is grave need Not be a burden, an anguish. Call it, instead, an anchor, Grief grounding us in its sea.

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.

Sometimes the extract is not an erasure, But an expansion. It is not a cut, but a culmination. Not a gash, but a growth.

We’ve never had to hate a human To hug another, never had to be fearful To be fond of the hearts beating out to us.

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

We, like the water, forget nothing, Forgo everything. Words, also like the water, Are a type of washing. Through them we cleanse ourselves Of what we are not.

We mourn the past More than we miss it. We revere the regular more Than we remember it honestly.

The earth is a magic act; Each second something beautiful On its stage vanishes, As if merely going home.

We have no word For becoming a ghost or a memory. To be a member of this place Is to remember its place, Its longitude of longing. This elegy, naturally, is insufficient. Say it plain. Call us who we left behind.

It’s not what was done that will haunt us, But what was withheld, What was kept out & kept away.

Where we can we shall hope. We found it in a million delicacies Of enormity—

We have never met & yet we have still lost sight of each other, Two lighthouses quavering in fog. We could not hold ourselves.

When has horror not been our heirloom.

Though we have never met, We have sensed the other all along, Quiet & wandering, wide-lit With the urge to move forward. No human is a stranger to us.

The hardest part of grief Is giving it a name. The pain pulls us apart, Like lips about to speak. Without language nothing can live At all, let alone Beyond itself.

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 sin...

We labor equally When we fall as when we rise. Always remember that What happened to us Happened through us. We wonder how close Can we come to light Before we shut our eyes.

This is not an allegory. Descend into ourselves, Like a fruit caught by its own branch. That clear plunge is the beginning Of what we ought to become.

Say our feet miss a step on a stair— Shock zagging hard up our veins— —Even as our foot forgives the ground. The blood jaggedly striking in our veins Reminding ourselves we are perishable

But prevailing, living & livid. Sometimes The fall Just makes Us More Ourselves.

Strength is separate from survival. What endures isn’t always what escapes & what is withered can still withstand. We watch men mend their amens, Words flapping against their hands. Poetry is its own prayer, The closest words come to will.

No. We are the whale, With a heart so huge It can’t help but wail. We can’t help but help. If given the choice, we would not be Among the Chosen, But amidst the Changed.

The future isn’t attained. It is atoned, until It is at one with history, Until home is more than memory, Until we can hold near Who we hold dear.

Let us take back our lives.

What we share is more Than what we’ve shed.

They think us monsters, then men, Predators, then persons again, Beasts, then beings, Horrors & then humans. Of all the stars the most beautiful Is nothing more than a monster, Just as starved & stranded as we are.

LIFE 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.

Love the earth / like we’ve failed it.

The same sapiens, we flooded our streets Demanding answers & change. To love is to be liable To ourselves & each other. Our need for nature Is our need for origins, The green tangled place Where we are of least consequence & yet still matter as much as anything.

MEMORIAL When we tell a story, We are living Memory. In ancient Greece, the Muses, the dainty-footed daughters of Memory, were thought to inspire artists. It isn’t knowing, but remembering, that makes us create. This would explain why so much great art arises from trauma, nostalgia, or testimony. But why alliteration? Why the pulsing percussion, the string of syllables? It is the poet who pounds the past back into you. The poet transcends “telling” or “performing” a story & instead remembers it, touches, tastes, traps its vastness.

Trauma is like a season, deep & dependable, a force we board our windows against. Even when it passes, it will wail its wild way back to our porch. We destroy everything good just so it will not shame us. How easy it is to both leave & love this place.

In this manner, collective memory need not be experienced firsthand to be remembered. Grief, healing, hope are not dependent on the first person & more often than not are recalled through many persons.

Even beside each other, it was in terror. Who else has mistaken pain for proximity.

A smile around here is like a sudden star, undead & loaded. To live only to die is to be doomed but redeemable. All we know so far is we are so far From what we know.