Amanda Gorman Quotes

Life is not what is promised,
But what is sought.
These bones, not what is found,
But what we've fought.
Our truth, not what we said,
But what we thought.
Our lesson, all we have taken
& all we have brought.

We will not march back to what was,
But move to what shall be:
A country that is bruised but whole,
Benevolent but bold.
Fierce and free.

Some griefs, like rivers, are uncross / able. They are not to be waded across / but walked beside. Our loss / colossal & blossomed / is never lost on us....

[from 'Alarum']

Jan 6: Trump supporters storm the US Capitol, leading to the deaths of five people. Somewhere a poet writes in moonless light & all at once puts her pen down.

That's what only words can do — Prod us toward something new
& in doing so, move us closer -> together.

We were told to never use I when writing, because eliminating this voice makes arguments legitimate. But we realize there is nothing that convinces like the self does - our life, our body & its beating, proving its own jagged point.

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

When day comes we ask ourselves where can we find light in this never-ending shade? 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. In the norms and notions of what "just is" isn’t always justice. And yet, the dawn is ours before we knew it. Somehow we do it. Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished.

Words, too, are a type of combat, for we always become what we refuse to say.

Riots are red Violence is blue We’re sick of dying How ’bout you

Writing, truth-telling to one another, is an act of hope-making when hope is hardest found. What place have we in our histories except the present.

Our wounds, too, are our windows
Through them we watch the world

Storytelling is the way that unarticulated memory becomes art, becomes artifact, becomes fact, becomes felt again, becomes free. Empires have been raised & razed on much less. There is nothing so agonizing, or so dangerous, as memory unexpressed, unexplored, unexplained & unexploded. Grief is the grenade that always goes off.

We forget this immensity, it will still be ours, for we wrote such mysteries down: we did the thing others dared not. We collected all the dazzling & dangerous & dreamed aches, scrapped them, though we did not yet have words by which to map them.

It’s said that ignorance is bliss. Ignorance is this: a vine that sneaks up a tree, killing not by poison, but by blocking out its light.