Amanda Gorman

Most of them immigrants. These people came Promised Land. They came fresh & they got Destroyed.

Never forget that to be alone Has always been a price for some & a privilege for others.

We became paid professionals of pain,
Specialists in suffering,
Aces of the ache,
Masters of the moan.

The hardest part of grief
Is giving it a name.
The pain pulls us apart,
Like lips about to speak.
Without language nothing can live
At all, let alone
Beyond itself.

Lost as we feel, there is no better
Compass than compassion.
We find ourselves not by being
The most seen, but the most seeing.

Change is made of choices,
& choices are made of character.

How we are moved says everything
About what we are to each other.

In 1863, deep in the Civil War's magnitude, Abraham Lincoln declared a day of gratitude Shared by one heart and one voice of America. A proclamation for a nation in a nightmare, This Thanksgiving dared Americans To chime their thanks at a time when many believed They had no thanks to give.

If we merge mercy with might, and might with right,
Then love becomes our legacy,
And change, our children's birthright.
So let us leave behind a country better
than the one we were left.

But the asking is not idle. It is when you are asking about something that you realize you yourself have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself. — Anne Carson

But I am hunting for something — anything — to give me some bearing, since I am, metaphorically speaking, at sea, having cut myself off from the comfort and predictability of my own language — my own meaning.

For it’s our grief that gives us our gratitude, Shows us how to find hope, if we ever lose it. So ensure that this ache wasn’t endured in vain: Do not ignore the pain. Give it purpose. Use it.

It will be a blessing if our children
Never fully grasp what
It took to come to this.
Grant them this poem
If they do forget it.
If they do, forget it.

through some fictions we find fact; in some fantasies we discover ourselves & then some.

But tomorrow isn’t revealed, Rather rendered, refined. Wrought. Remember that fate isn’t fought Against. It is fought for. Again & again.

The densest despair takes
Us to no ordinary joy.
Sometimes diving
Into the deep inside us
Is the only way
We rise above it.