Photo by Fernando @cferdo

Below is excerpt and three poems from the recent New Yorker piece on Amanda Gorman’s new book Call Us What We Carry:

When Amanda Gorman read her poem “The Hill We Climb” at the 2021 U.S. Presidential Inauguration, she became both the inheritor of a long tradition and a herald of something new. Her verse, as vibrant and elegant as her yellow coat against the cold, illuminated the imagination as well as the occasion, confirming her as a worthy successor to several other Black women inaugural poets writing to and for an American ideal—a lineage traceable all the way back to Phillis Wheatley, who, at the dawn of the Republic, addressed a poem to then General George Washington. As Gorman acknowledged this country’s contested history, and its contemporary tumult, her invocation of the plural pronoun “we” reminded us that, for good or literal ill, our lives are connected. Hers was an invitation to move forward together.

SHIP’S MANIFEST

Allegedly the worst is behind us.
Still, we crouch before the lip of tomorrow,
Halting like a headless hant in our own house,
Waiting to remember exactly
What it is we’re supposed to be doing.

& what exactly are we supposed to be doing?
Penning a letter to the world as a daughter of it.
We are writing with vanishing meaning,
Our words water dragging down a windshield.
The poet’s diagnosis is that what we have lived
Has already warped itself into a fever dream,
The contours of its shape stripped from the murky mind.

To be accountable we must render an account:
Not what was said, but what was meant.
Not the fact, but what was felt.
What was known, even while unnamed.
Our greatest test will be
Our testimony.
This book is a message in a bottle.
This book is a letter.
This book does not let up.
This book is awake.
This book is a wake.
For what is a record but a reckoning?
The capsule captured?
A repository.
An ark articulated?
& the poet, the preserver
Of ghosts & gains,
Our demons & dreams,
Our haunts & hopes.
Here’s to the preservation
Of a light so terrible.

 

ARBORESCENT I

We are
   Arborescent—
What goes
   Unseen
Is at the very
   Root of ourselves.
Distance can
   Distort our deepest
Sense
   Of who
We are,
   Leave us
Warped
   & wasted
As winter’s
   Wind. We will
Not walk
   From what
We’ve borne.
   We would
Keep it
   For a while.
Sit silent &
   Swinging on its branches
Like a child
   Refusing to come
Home. We would
   Keep,
We would
   Weep,
Knowing how
   We would
Again
   Give up
Our world
   For this one.

 

CALL US

Grant us this day
Bruising the make of us.

At times over half of our bodies
Are not our own,

Our persons made vessel
For nonhuman cells.

To them we are
A boat of a being,

Essential.
A country,

A continent,
A planet.

A human
Microbiome is all the writhing forms on

& inside this body
Drafted under our life.

We are not me—
We are we.

Call us
What we carry.

 

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