Call Us What We Carry

by Amanda Gorman

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.

Shall this leave us bitter? Or better? Grieve. Then choose.

Just like a skill or any art, We cannot possess hope without practicing it. It is the most fundamental craft we demand of ourselves.

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

A racial insult renders us a mammal, albeit less free. In short, a slur is a sound that beasts us.

In 1900 Surgeon General Walter Wyman described the bubonic plague as an “Oriental disease, peculiar to rice eaters.” As if we are what we eat & not also who we cheat, what we tweet.

Words, too, are a type of combat, for we always become what we refuse to say.

Some were asked to walk a fraction / of our exclusion for a year & it almost destroyed all they thought they were. Yet here we are. Still walking, still kept. To be kept to the edges of existence is the inheritance of the marginalized.

Non-being, i.e., distance from society—social distance—is the very heritage of the oppressed. Which means to the oppressor, social distance is a humiliation. It is to be something less than free, or worse, someone less-than-white.

Fundamentally, supremacism means doing anything to keep one’s sole conceit, Even if it means losing one’s soul. It means not wearing the mask that would save you, for that would mean taking off one’s privilege. It means, always, choosing poisonous Pride over Preservation, Pride over Nation, Pride over Anyone or anything.

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

Together, we envision a land that is liberated, not lawless. We create a future that is free, not flawless. Again & again, over & over, We will stride up every mountainside, Magnanimous & modest. We will be protected & served By a force that is honored & honest. This is more than protest. It’s a promise.

This nearly tore us apart. Yes, indeed. It tears us to start.

Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true: That even as we grieved, we grew, That even as we hurt, we hoped, That even as we tired, we tried. That we’ll forever be tied together. Victorious, Not because we will never again know defeat, But because we will never again sow division.

The hill we climb, if only we dare it: Because being American is more than a pride we inherit— It’s the past we step into and how we repair it.