It was a stunning moment. In the same spot where offensive,
violent language had been used to incite and fuel a riot, Amanda Gorman
stood in the sunshine and reintroduced the language of peace and music.
"Then Victory won't lie in the blade / But in all the bridges we've made / That
is the promise to glade / The hill we climb / If only we dare / It's"
To see Amanda in her beautiful yellow coat and her red headband and just her radiant skin,
just to walk up there with a smile on her face and perform such a beautiful piece of art,
without any fear. She seemed so sure of herself and so sure of the future of our country.
"We will rebuild, reconcile, and recover / and every known nook of our nation..."
Before she even spoke a word, Amanda Gorman took the stage in the company of powerful allies,
aligning herself with the tradition of Black women poets, artists, politicians, and activists.
She arrived as a burst of light and then she spoke
in a voice with words for this generation. She reminded us that "poetry is not a luxury."
"in this faith we trust / For while we have our eyes
on the future / history has its eyes on us / This is the era of just redemption..."
She does this incredible thing of taking these two massive ideas--
one that we can be hopeful at a time like this, that the dawn is ours,
that our country is not broken but is rebuilding--and the second idea that
that we can take steps to to act, and the incredible amount of work that is still ahead.
What I loved about Amanda Gorman's poem "The Hill We Climb" is how passionately
and seemingly effortlessly she unites us in one of the most difficult forms: the public poem.
And I think that spoken word's emphasis on rhythm, multiple rhymes on the same sound, and a creative
play where the sonic interconnections of words serves Amanda beautifully in this poem.
"We close the divide because we know, to put our future first, / we must first put our
differences aside / We lay down our arms / so we can reach out our arms / to one
another / We seek harm to none and harmony for all..."
Gorman's lines "We lay down our arms / so we can reach out our arms / to
one another" emphasize that a single word can represent both the forces of violence
and also the forces of love. And that it's up to us to choose that context.
I love the way she used rhyme toward inclusion. She built strings of rhymes
that in some way encapsulated the poem's entire meaning: "dare it," "inherit," "repair it," "share it."
Or she uses rhyme as a magical spell of undoing and reversal: "division" / "envision."
Her rhymes often find the healing words within other words, locating "us" inside "trust."
"The loss we carry, / a sea we must wade / We've
braved the belly of the beast / We've learned that quiet
isn't always peace / And the norms and notions / of what just is / Isn't always just-ice..."
She spoke alongside the power that brought her to Washington DC
and she also spoke at that power, challenging it to rise up for this occasion, address its past,
be ready to make repairs and to learn how to reinvent itself,
challenging it to lead us in the important work of reimagining ourselves.
And Gorman gives us that: a poem that warms and warns at the same time, that allows us to
celebrate this moment while looking forward at the labor that is still ahead, at the
the activism that is asked of us, activism that will look like a thousand different things,
that will look like protests in the street and bravely putting your body into public places, but
also quiet acts of activism, of quietly advancing the notion that our country should be more
tolerant, more compassionate, than it is--in your words and actions and perhaps even in your poems.
It allows me to imagine a world where people of color, women of color, trans people... A skinny
Black girl is standing there at the Inauguration of the President of the United States, speaking.
And our voices have so often been left in the dust and quieted and spoken over... And it just allows
me to imagine a world where everyone is heard and everyone has the opportunity to be listened to.