Amanda Gorman Quotes

This poem & its pain are both imagined & as real as we are. That is to say, through some fictions we find fact; in some fantasies we discover ourselves & then some. Even without living it, a memory can live on in us. The past is never gone, just not yet found. Grief, like glass, can be both a mirror & a window, enabling us to look both in & out, then & now & how. In other words, we become a window pain. Only somewhere in loss do we find the grace to gaze up & out of ourselves.

"Good Grief

The origin of the word trauma
Is not just "wound," but "piercing" or "turning,"
As blades do when finding home.
Grief commands its own grammar,
Structured by intimacy & imagination.
We often say:
We are beside ourselves with grief.
We can't even imagine.
This means anguish can call us to envision
More than what we believed was carriable
Or even survivable.
That is to say, there does exist
A good grief.

The hurt is how we know
We are alive & awake;
It clears for us all the exquisite,
Excruciating enormities to come.
We are pierced new by the turning
Forward.

All that is grave need
Not be a burden, an anguish.
Call it instead, an anchor,
Grief grounding us in the sea.
Despair exits us the same way it enters — Turning through the mouth.
Even now conviction works
Strange magic on our tongues.
We are built up again
By what we
Build/find/see/say/remember/know.
What we carry means we survive,
It is what survives us.
We have survived us.
Where once we were alone,
Now we are beside ourselves.
Where once we were barbed & brutal as blades,
Now we can only imagine."

At the end of their journey, a hero may stand in the same place where their story started, but nevertheless they have been irrevocably shifted, altered, displaced.

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']

Some days, we just need a place where we can bleed in peace. Our only word for this is poem.

We can only fully understand language by what doesn't survive it.

So while we once asked: How could we possibly prevail over catastrophe?
Now we assert: How could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?

Words matter, for Language is an ark. Yes, Language is an art, An articulate artifact. Language is a life craft. Yes, Language is a life raft.

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

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

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.

Let no one again
Have to begin, love, or end, alone.

So while once we asked: How could we possibly prevail
over catastrophe?
Now we assert: How could catastrophe possibly prevail
over us?

To put it plain / we have shipwrecked the earth / soiled the soil / & run the ground aground. / Listen. We are the loud toll / on this planet. / Our future needs us / alarmed. Man is a myth / in the making.

There truly is a unity That requires no “they” For us to be threatened by. This is the very definition of love. We’ve never had to hate a human To hug another, never had to be fearful To be fond of the hearts beating out to us.