Call Us What We Carry

by Amanda Gorman

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 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.

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.

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

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

There truly is a unity That requires no “they” For us to be threatened by. This is the very definition of love. 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.

We mourn the past More than we miss it. We revere the regular more Than we remember it honestly. Don’t we recognize All the ways Normal can S p utt e r & Die.

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

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.

To be captive, then, is to be rendered a trope of oneself.]

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.

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.

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

In Spanish, the word for value is the same as for bravery: valor. Courage must cost us something, or else it is worth nothing at all.

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

This republic was bred shady. Country of guns & germs & steal- ing land & life. O say can we see The blood we stand on, Shining below us

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.

The truth is, we are one nation, under fraud. Tell us, honestly: Will we ever be who we say.

To begin again Isn’t to go backwards, But to decide to go.

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 new dawn blooms as we free it, For there is always light, If only we’re brave enough to see it, If only we’re brave enough to be it.