Call Us What We Carry

by Amanda Gorman

By Goodbye, we truly mean: Let us be able to say hello again.

Defining Goodbye

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.

By Hello, we mean: Let us not say goodbye again.

Defining Hello

There is power in being robbed & still choosing to dance.

Grant them this poem If they do forget it. If they do, forget it.

We might not be fully sure of all that we are. & yet we have endured all that we were.

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

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

Some distances, if allowed to grow, Are merely the greatest proximities.

Perhaps pain is like a name, Made to sing just for you.

The hurt is how we know We are alive & awake;

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

To ship, in colloquial terms, means to imagine or place as a pair, to push two persons or things together, whereby we ship them. It is a shortened, verbed version of relationship, to dream of love where there was blankness.

Hope is the soft bird We send across the sea To see if this earth is still home.

Yes, nostalgia has its purposes— Transport from the spectered, The jobs never coming back, The mothers’ primal screams, Our children’s minds shuttered from school, The funerals without families, Weddings in waiting, The births in isolation. Let no one again Have to begin, love, or end, alone.

It took us losing ourselves To see we require no kingdom But this kinship. It is the nightmare, never The dream, that shocks us awake.

Like a page, we are only legible When opened to one another.

The future isn’t attained. It is atoned, until It is at one with history, Until home is more than memory, Until we can hold near Who we hold dear.

In other words, Our scars are the brightest Parts of us.

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

Love the earth / like we’ve failed it.

What can never be brought back / can still be brought forth

[Locked down, the animal may perform the behavior in the same way over & over, at the same time over & over, in the same place, over & over, with the same results. What we’re describing is insanity. Or 2020.]

It isn’t knowing, but remembering, that makes us create. This would explain why so much great art arises from trauma, nostalgia, or testimony.

The trauma becomes: I/she/he/you/they/we remember. I/she/he/you/they/we were there.

Poke the scar until it speaks.

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.

All we know so far is we are so far From what we know.

Perhaps tomorrow cannot wait to be today.

Countless countries laid blame to one another. What the US called the Spanish influenza, Spain called the French flu, or the Naples Soldier. What Germans dubbed the Russian Pest, the Russians called the Chinese flu.

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.

Again, words matter(ed).

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

In Spanish, the definite article the is used far more frequently. It’s not blue, it’s the blue, el azul. The black, el negro. Not history, the history. As if there froth many pasts & we must be clear on which one we are forgiving, if any.

Ignorance isn’t bliss. Ignorance is to miss: to block ourselves from seeing sky.

The Letters In a letter I received from you two weeks ago I noticed a comma in the middle of a phrase. It changed the meaning—did you intend this? One stroke and you’ve consumed my waking days. —Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton

‘This girl was buried in the trench.’ This girl was our trench. Where else to put her.fn1

After we fight Someone we love, We offer a question: Are we okay? Are we good? The First World War was once called “Great,” So named “The War to End All Wars.” Ha. What is called “great” Is often grievous & gruesome, But what is good is worth our words. Good trouble. Good fight.

Good will. Good people. To be good is to be larger than war. It is to be more than great.

Writing, truth-telling to one another, is an act of hope-making when hope is hardest found.

Hate only survives when hosted in humans. If we are to give it anything, Let it be our sorrow & never our skin. To love just may be The fight of our lives.

What we might’ve been if only we’d tried.

What we might become, if only we’d listen.

Again, language matters. Children have been taught— America: without her, democracy fails. But the truth is: America without her democracy fails.

We’re optimistic, not because we have hope, But because only by being optimistic can hope Be ours to have.

Do not ignore the pain. Give it purpose. Use it.

Read children’s books, dance alone to DJ music. Know that this distance will make our hearts grow fonder. From these waves of woes our world will emerge stronger.

In testing times, we became the best of beings.

As the world came apart, We have come together.

Sometimes diving Into the deep inside us Is the only way We rise above it.