Call Us What We Carry

by Amanda Gorman

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 added a thousand false steps To our walk tracker today Because every step we’ve taken Has required more than we had to give.

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.

That’s what love does: It makes a fact faced beyond fear.

Graduation day. We don’t need a gown. We don’t need a stage.

We are walking beside our ancestors, Their drums roar for us, Their feet stomp at our life. There is power in being robbed & still choosing to dance.

What are we, if not what we see in another.

It will be a blessing if our children Never fully grasp what It took to come to this.

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

The deepest despair is ravenous, It takes & takes & takes, A stomach never satisfied.

Grief, when it goes, does so softly, Like the exit of that breath We just realized we clutched.

Since the world is round, There is no way to walk away From each other, for even then We are coming back together.

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. —Toni Morrison

We mourn the past More than we miss it.

Our children’s minds shuttered from school, The funerals without families, Weddings in waiting, The births in isolation. Let no one again Have to begin, love, or end, alone.

Lost as we feel, there is no better Compass than compassion. We find ourselves not by being The most seen, but the most seeing.

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.

Our need for nature Is our need for origins,

at times even the queen Must carry & bury her dead.

It isn’t knowing, but remembering, that makes us create. This would explain why so much great art arises from trauma, nostalgia, or testimony.

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.

All we know so far is we are so far From what we know.

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.

No matter what we’re told, violence is never little.

The first step in warfare & pandemics is the same: Isolation, to rupture the channels of communication of virus/violence.

But bloodshed in war is no misfire. Perhaps casualty means that war itself Is the accident, unmistakably a mistake, Our big, fat, bloody oops!

Together, we envision a land that is liberated, not lawless. We create a future that is free, not flawless.

We were brought here & all we got was this lousy T-shirt, This drowsy, free hurt.

What can we call a country that destroys Itself just because it can? A nation that would char Rather than change? Our only word for this is Home.