Amanda Gorman - Call Us What We Carry

When we talked to each other, Our sentences were stilted & stalled as a telegram. Hope we are doing well/As we can be/In all these times/Unprecedented & unpresidented. When asking how others were faring, We did not expect an honest or full response. What words can answer how were remaining alive? We became paid professionals of pain, Specialists in suffering, Aces of the ache, Masters of the moan. March shuddered into a year, Sloshing with millions of lonely, An overcrowded solitude. We pray there will never be such a Precise & peopled hurt as this. 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. The phrases that remained Were their own violence: That was sicckk!Ha! were dead.We are deceased. 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. Sorry for the long text; 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.

We do pound for what has passed, But more so all that we passed by Unthanking, unknowing, When what we had was ours. There was another gap that choked us: 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. This is edgeless doubt: Every cough seemed catastrophe, Every proximate person a potential peril. We mapped each sneeze & sniffle, Certain the virus we had run away from Was now running through us. We slept the days down.

We wept the year away, Frayed & afraid. Perhaps that is what it means To breathe & die in this flesh. Forgive us, For we have walked This before. History flickered in & out of our vision, A movie our eyelids Staggered through. We added a thousand false steps To our walk tracker today Because every step weve taken Has required more than we had to give. In such eternal nature, We spent days as the walking dead, Dreading disease & disaster.

We cowered, bone-shriveled As a laurel in drought, our throats Made of frantic workings, Feet falling over themselves Like famished fawns. We awaited horrors, Building up leviathans before they arose. We could not pull our heads From the raucous deep. 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 were already thousands Of deaths into the year.

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? What hope shall we shelter Within us like a secret, Second smile, Private & pure. Sorry if were way less friendly We had COVID tryna end things. Even now handshakes & hugs are like gifts, Something we are shocked to grant, be granted. & so, we forage for anything That feels like this: The click in our lung that ties us to strangers, How when among those we care for most We shift with instinct, Like the flash of a school of fish. Our regard for one another Not tumored, Just transformed. By Hello, we mean: Let us not say goodbye again. There is someone we would die for.

Feel that fierce, unshifting truth, That braced & ready sacrifice. Thats what love does: It makes a fact faced beyond fear. We have lost too much to lose. We lean against each other again, The way water bleeds into itself. This glassed hour, paused, Bursts like a loaded star, Belonging always to us. What more must we believe in.