Call Us What We Carry

by Amanda Gorman

History and elegy are akin.

Still, we crouch before the lip of tomorrow, Halting like a headless hant in our own house, Waiting to remember exactly What it is we’re supposed to be doing.

To be accountable we must render an account:

What goes Unseen Is at the very Root of ourselves.

We will Not walk From what We’ve borne.

Home.We would Keep, We would Weep,

Hope we are doing well/ As we can be/ In all these times/ Unprecedented & unpresidented.

We became paid professionals of pain, Specialists in suffering,

March shuddered into a year, Sloshing with millions of lonely, An overcrowded solitude.

We began to lose words As trees forget their leaves in fall. The language we spoke Had no place for excited, Eager, laughter, joy, Friend, get together.

We teach children: Leave a mark on the world. What leads a man to shoot up Souls but the desire to mark

There are no small words in the mouth. We find the rhetoric of reunion By letting love reclaim our tongues, The tip of the teeth. Our hearts have always Been in our throats.

History flickered in & out of our vision, A movie our eyelids Staggered through.

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.

Every time we fell heart-first into the news, Head-first, dread-first, Our bodies tight & tensed with what now? Yet who has the courage to inquire what if?

now handshakes & hugs are like gifts, Something we are shocked to grant, be granted. & so, we forage for anything

These words need not be red for our blood to run through them. When tragedy threatens to end us, we are flooded by what is felt;

Even as they did not die For us, we shall move for them.

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

What we have lived Remains indecipherable. & yet we remain. & still, we write. & so, we write.

This truth, like the white-blown sky, Can only be felt in its entirety or not at all.

* Disease is physiological death, Loneliness is a social one, Where the old We collapses like a lung.

Some traumas flood past the body, An ache unbordered by bone.

There is no meek way to mend. You must ruin us carefully.

anguish can call us to envision More than what we believed was carriable Or even survivable. This is to say, there does exist A good grief.

Grief grounding us in its sea. Despair exits us the same way it enters— Turning through the mouth.

We are not me— We are we. Call us What we carry.

Add -ship to the end of a world & it transforms our meaning.

Sometimes the extract is not an erasure, But an expansion.

Perhaps our relationships are the very make of us, For fellowship is both our nature & our necessity.

This is the very definition of love. We’ve never had to hate a human

We swam through the news Like a ship bucking at sea. For a year our television Was a lighthouse, blinking Only in warning & never in warmth.

The earth is a magic act; Each second something beautiful

But do not fear our ghosts. Learn from them.

The hardest part of grief Is giving it a name.

Poetry is its own prayer, The closest words come to will.

Of all the stars the most beautiful Is nothing more than a monster, Just as starved & stranded as we are.

The celestial Stitched inside us. Slant upward,

Marianne Hirsch posits that the children of Holocaust survivors grow up with memories of their parents’ trauma; that is to say, they can remember ordeals that they did not experience personally. Hirsch calls this postmemory.

The whiplike echo of Jim Crow, too, passes through Black bodies, even before birth.

Trauma is like a season, deep & dependable, a force we board our windows against. Even when it passes, it will wail its wild way back to our porch.

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?

A smile around here is like a sudden star, undead & loaded. To live only to die is to be doomed but redeemable.

We wrap our arms around ourselves, as if we can possibly hold the whole of who we are within us

We can only fully understand language by what doesn’t survive it.

ignorance is a sound that beats us—blue, black, yellow, red, a wretch of a rainbow.

Goodness is how we move our words into something new: a kind of grace.

We have walked the skyless depths it cost for us just to be all right.

This feeling might be pain, poetry, or both. But at least it is no lie. Ignorance isn’t bliss. Ignorance is to miss: to block ourselves from seeing sky.