Call Us What We Carry

by Amanda Gorman

To try is to take a stab, To take a shot. We want to find who made us A slaughterhouse, A rhetoric that works in red. 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? To scar it & thus make it his. His intention to be remembered, Even if for a ragged wreckage. Kids, unmark this place. Leave it nothing Like the one we left behind.

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.

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.

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

Sometimes The fall Just makes Us More Ourselves.

Lasting meant being separate Together, proximate in our distance. To be a part of the living, We had to be apart from it, Alive but alone. It was death by survival.

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.

they can remember ordeals that they did not experience personally. Hirsch calls this postmemory.

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.

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.

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.

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. For what does the Karen carry but her dwindling power, dying & desperate? Dangerous & dangling like a gun hung from a tongue?

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.

Riots are red Violence is blue We’re sick of dying How ’bout you

Disbelief is a luxury We never possessed, A pause that never was. How many times have we wheezed A dread to last all night long. The truth is, one nation under guns.

Because being American is more than a pride we inherit— It’s the past we step into and how we repair it.