Call Us What We Carry

by Amanda Gorman

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

Some days, we just need a place Where we can bleed in peace.

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

The funerals without families, Weddings in waiting, The births in isolation. Let no one again Have to begin, love, or end, alone.

Our wounds, too, are our windows. Through them we watch the world.

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.

Pay attention. Concern is the debt We always owed each other.

Our scars are the brightest Parts of us.

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.

Pre-memory defines who we are as a people. Will we forget, erase, censor, distort the experience as we live it, so that it cannot be fully remembered? Or will we ask, carry, keep, share, listen, truth-tell, so it need not be fully relived? It is the moral difference between collective amnesia & collective remembrance.

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.

Sometimes, we must call our monster out from under the bed to see he/she/it carries our face.

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.

Courage must cost us something, or else it is worth nothing at all.

Never forget that to be alone Has always been a price for some & a privilege for others.

Why it’s so perturbing for privileged groups to follow restrictions of place & personhood. Doing so means for once wearing the chains their power has shackled on the rest of us. It is to surrender the one difference that kept them separate & thus superior.

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

There is always someone missing from the music.

When told we can’t make a difference, we’ll still make a sound.