Including 'The Hill We Climb,' the stirring poem read at the inauguration of the 46th President of the United States, Joe Biden, Amanda Gorman's remarkable new collection reveals an energizing and unforgettable poetic voice. Call Us What We Carry is Gorman at her finest. Bursting with musical language and exploring themes of identity, grief, and memory, this lyric of hope and healing captures an important moment in our collective consciousness while being utterly timeless.
FUGUE
Don’t get us wrong.
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
Th is 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 we’ve 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,
Th e 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 we’re 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.
That’s 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.
* In fact, levels of social trust have been in a steep decline in the United States. See David Brooks. Strikingly, a 2021 study suggests that the descendants of the survivors of the 1918 influenza epidemic experienced lowered social trust. See Arnstein Aassve et al.
SCHOOL’S OUT
The announcement
Swung blunt as an axe-blow:
All students were to leave
Campus as soon as possible.
We think we cried,
Our brains bleached blank.
We were already trying to forget
What we would live.
What we would give.
* * *
Beware the ides of March.
We recognized that something ran
Rampant as a rumor
Among our ranks.
Cases bleeding closer,
Like spillage in a napkin.
There is nothing more worrisome
Than a titan who believes itself
Separate from the world.
* * *
Graduation day.
We don’t need a gown.
We don’t need a stage.
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.
THERE’S NO POWER LIKE HOME
We were sick of home,
Home sick.
Th at mask around our ear
Hung itself into the year.
Once we stepped into our home,
We found ourselves gasping, tearing
it off like a bandage,
Like something that gauzed
The great gape of our mouth.
Even faceless, a smile can still
Scale up our cheeks,
Bone by bone,
Our eyes crinkling
Delicately as rice paper
At some equally fragile beauty—
The warbling blues of a dog,
A squirrel venturing close,
The lilt of a beloved’s joke.
Our mask is no veil, but a view.
What are we, if not what we see in another.
SURVIVING
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;
Our faces fluctuating, warped like an acre passing
Seasons. Perhaps the years are plotted & planned
Just like seeds in a fresh-plowed field.
When we dream, we act only with instinct.
We might not be fully sure of all that we are.
& yet we have endured all that we were.
Even now we’re shuddering:
The revelation aching.
It didn’t have to be this way.
In fact, it did not have to be.
The gone were/are no threshold,
No stepstone beneath our feet.
Even as they did not die
For us, we shall move for them.
We shall only learn when we let this loss,
Like us, sing on & on.
THE SHALLOWS
Touch-deficient &
Light-starved we were,
Like an inverted flame,
Eating any warmth down to its studs.
Th e deepest despair is ravenous,
It takes & takes & takes,
A stomach never satisfied.
This is not hyperbole.
All that is gorgeous & good & decent
Is no luxury, not when its void
Brings us to the wide wharf of war.
Even as we stand stone-still,
It’s with the entirety of what we’ve lost
Sweeping through us like a ghost.
What we have lived
Remains indecipherable.
& yet we remain.
& still, we write.
& so, we write.
Watch us move above the fog
Like a promontory at dusk.
Shall this leave us bitter?
Or better?
Grieve.
Then choose.
& SO
It is easy to harp,
Harder to hope.
This truth, like the white-blown sky,
Can only be felt in its entirety or not at all.
The glorious was not made to be piecemeal.
Despite being drenched with dread,
This dark girl still dreams.
We smile like a sun that is never shunted.
Grief, when it goes, does so softly,
Like the exit of that breath
We just realized we clutched.
Since the world is round,
Th ere 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.
CUT
There is no simple way to hurt.
The real damage is dammed, disrupted.
:Inaudible:
We must change
This ending in every way.
* * *
Disease is physiological death,
Loneliness is a social one,
Where the old We collapses like a lung.
* * *
Some days, we just need a place
Where we can bleed in peace.
Our only word for this is
Poem.
* * *
There is no right way to say
How we have missed one another.
Some traumas flood past the body,
An ache unbordered by bone.
When we shift toward a kindred soul,
It is with the cut of all our lives.
Perhaps pain is like a name,
Made to sing just for you.
* * *
We issue an apology
From our warbling palms:
We are still hurt,
But for now, we no longer hurt
One another.
There is no meek way to mend.
You must ruin us carefully.
Extracted from Call Us What We Carry by Amanda Gorman.
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Extract: Wild Imperfections compiled and edited by Natalia Molebatsi