Amanda Gorman Quotes

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 biter?
Or better?

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.

I can hear change humming
In its loudest, proudest song.
I don’t fear change coming,
And so I sing along.

We write
Because you might listen.

"During COVID, we've all been kept out of things. Gorman's poem eloquently lists many of the things we've been kept out of. Then she wrote -

"Kept out of,
kept in,
kept from,
kept behind,
kept below,
kept down.
Kept without life.

Some were asked to walk a fraction of our exclusion for a year and it almost destroyed all they thought they were.

Yet here we are. Still Walking. Still kept.

To be kept to the edges of existence is the inheritance of the marginalized.

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

When asking how others were faring
We did not expect an honest or full response.
What words can answer how we're remaining alive?

Disease is physiological death, Loneliness is a social one, Where the old We collapses like a lung.

& tell us: what is the hour
But a rotation by which we mark our grief

Erasure demands a lifetime of rehearsal. Do you really understand what it is to be this disposable body. We recognize the sobs now for the flags they were. The jerk of our heads, as if waking from a dream — or a nightmare. You decide. This is not the nation we built, at most not the nation we've known. Know. Oh, no. This is the nation we've sewn. It is our right to weep for the wound we've always been. A silent shock out of the blue: a hand hung to another or a head pillowed by a shoulder is by far worth more than anything we've won or wanted. When told we can't make a difference, we'll still make a sound.

The truth is, we are one nation, under fraud.
Tell us, honestly:
Will we ever be who we say.

The crescent moon, The night’s lucent lesion. We are felled oaks beneath it, Branches full of empty. Look closer. What we share is more Than what we’ve shed.

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.

The only way to correctly predict
The future is to pave it,
Is to brave it.

We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace, And the norms and notions of what “just is” Isn’t always justice.