Let each dawn find us courageous, brought closer, heeding the lights before the fight is over.

Would we crave peace
If we knew what it was.

May we not just grieve, but give. May we not just ache, but act.

Maybe everything hurts,
Our hearts shadowed & strange.
But only when everything hurts
May everything change.

We are the good news that we have been looking for,
Demonstrating that every dusk holds a dawn disguised within it.
Today we don’t burst into a new world.
We begin it.

You don’t have to be a poet, you don’t have to be a politician or be in the White House to make an impact with your words. We all have this capacity to find solutions for the future.

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.

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.

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.

Together, we envision a land that is liberated, not lawless.
We create a future that is free, not flawless.
Again & again, over & over,
We will stride up every mountainside,
Magnanimous & modest.

We’re more conditioned
To contagion than combat.
But a virus, just like a war, separates us
From our fellow people.
Yet if we are willing, the cut
Can be an aperture, the hole
Through which we reach for the whole
Of one another.

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 bitter?
Or better?
Grieve.
Then choose.

Only when we’re drowning do we understand how fierce our feet can kick.

We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another. We seek harm to none and harmony for all. Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true. That even as we grieved, we grew. That even as we hurt, we hoped. That even as we tired, we tried. That we’ll forever be tied together victorious. Not because we will never again know defeat, but because we will never again sow division.

We don’t need a gown.
We don’t need a stage.
We are walking beside our ancestors,
Their drums roar for us,
Their feet stomp at our life.
There is power in being robbed
& still choosing to dance.

Our scars are the brightest parts of us.

I was obsessed with everything and anything; I wanted to learn everything, to read everything, to do everything. I was constantly on sensory overload. I’d hoard dozens of books in my second-grade cubby, and literally try to read two at a time, side by side.0.

It wasn’t until I was named Youth Poet Laureate of L.A. in high school though that I officially began calling myself a poet. I just always loved writing, period.

My speech impediment wasn’t a stutter but it was dropping several letters that I just could not say for several years, most specifically the ‘r’ sound.

I grew up at this incredibly odd intersection in Los Angeles, where it felt like the black ‘hood met black elegance met white gentrification met Latin culture met wetlands.

To hone my voice, I read everything, from books to cereal boxes, three times: once for fun, the second time to learn something new about the writing craft, and the third time was to improve that piece.

It’s this weird binary where I’m getting media images and narratives thrown at me all the time through something I hold in my hand, and that’s never happened to other generations. But also with this little object in my hand, I have the ability to document police brutality, or post about the Syrian conflict on Twitter.

As a young black woman, I notice at times in the mainstream media framing of the ‘me too’ movement you see a white female face or a white male face, and that type of questioning and interrogation needs to happen.

I think we run into issues when our online brands are not rooted in who we are, and I think we need to have explicit discussions with ourselves about who we want to be, what we want to represent, and how we want to express that.

Most of my life I was particularly terrified of speaking up, because I had a speech impediment, which made it difficult to pronounce certain letters, sounds, and I felt like I was fine writing on the page, but once I got on stage, I was worried my words might jumble and stumble.

But as for the future, I foresee a world which is more creative, more open, more loving, more ecologically friendly, more honest about its history and progress, and I think a lot of those contributions will be made by young people.

Whenever I listen to songs, I rewrite them in my head.

I am the daughter of Black writers who are descended from Freedom Fighters who broke their chains and changed the world. They call me.

That’s kind of the challenging thing about writing an inaugural poem. You’re speaking to everyone, but you don’t also want to speak for everyone.

I think that’s the challenge of our generation: if we are all technology natives, how do we live with influence both online and off, and how do we make sure that both of those aren’t lacking in some type of deeper human connection and substance?

I was born early, along with my twin, and a lot of times, for infants, that can lead to learning delays.

It was so incredible meeting Lady Gaga. I mean I’m gaga for Gaga, literally. We kind of just each flew to each other like magnets after the ceremony ended and we were both just crying and hugging.

When you have to teach yourself how to say sounds, when you have to be highly concerned about pronunciation, it gives you a certain awareness of sonics, of the auditory experience.

When you are learning through poetry how to speak English, it lends to a great understanding of sound, of pitch, of pronunciation, so I think of my speech impediment not as a weakness or a disability, but as one of my greatest strengths.

I don’t want it to be something that becomes a cage, where to be a successful Black girl, you have to be Amanda Gorman and go to Harvard. I want someone to eventually disrupt the model I have established.

I love Black poets. I love that as a Black girl, I get to participate in that legacy. So that’s Yusef Komunyakaa, Sonia Sanchez, Tracy K. Smith, Phillis Wheatley.

This is a long, long, faraway goal, but 2036 I am running for office to be president of the United States. So you can put that in your iCloud calendar.

Writing wasn’t just a form of expression. It was a form of pathology by embarking on spoken word over and over and over again and reciting my poems.

I think it made me all that much stronger of a writer when you have to teach yourself how to say words from scratch.

I think sometimes our terror is a great kind of flag to symbolize a type of love or greatness. The fact that I was so afraid, that I knew there was a reason that I was tapping into every well of courage that I had to show up into that space. Because the space needed to be revisited; that space needed to be revamped and it needed to be reconciled with. And I thought one of the few and also most fervent ways we have to do that is with poems.

The single greatest challenge of our era is to transform without wrath, war, or wariness.

There is no such thing as gentle war.
There is no peace
That can’t be flung aside.
Our only enemy is that which would
Make us enemies to each other.

Know what we’ve fought
Need not be forgot nor for none.
It defines us, binds us as one,
Come over, join this day just begun.
For wherever we come together,
We will forever overcome.

Hear me as a woman
Have me as your sister
On purpled battlefield breaking day,
So I might say our victory is just beginning,
See me as change,
Say I am movement,
That I am the year
And I am the era
Of the women.

All of us bring light to exciting solutions never tried before
For it is our hope that implores us, at our uncompromising core,
To keep rising up for an earth more than worth fighting for.

I have to interweave my poetry with purpose. For me, that purpose is to help people, and to shed a light on issues that have far too long been in the darkness.

Poetry is the lens we use to interrogate the history we stand on and the future we stand for.

To love one another just may be the fight of our lives.

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

The same sapiens, we flooded our streets
Demanding answers & change.
To love is to be liable
To ourselves & each other.

Every second, what we feel
For our people & our planet
Almost brings us to our knees,
A compassion that nearly destroys
Us with its massiveness.
There is no love

Please.
Do not ask us who we are.
The hardest part of grief
Is giving it a name.

Lost as we feel, there is no better
Compass than compassion.

This feeling might be pain, poetry, or both. But at least it is no lie. Ignorance isn’t bliss. Ignorance is to miss: to block ourselves from seeing sky.

As kids we sat in grass,
Fished our hands into the dirt.
We felt that damp brown
Universe writhe, alert & alive,
Earth cupped in the boat of our palms.

Our whole year swallowed,
As if by a massive maw.
What else could stomach
Our hearts, huge with hurt,
Everyone & everything hell.

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

Stereotypies are demonstrated in many animals, including elephants, horses, polar bears, macaques & humans. Because stereotypic behavior is not seen in the wild, it is considered a strong indicator of poor psychological health in the caged organism. Thus, stereotypies are termed abnormal (or, rather, the captive environment is the true abnormality). Smaller cages can exacerbate stereotypies. To be captive, then, is to be rendered a trope of oneself.

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.

Contrary to popular belief, it’s not easy for us to lie. Even the body has tells, even our blood runs toward truth.

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

The slain fueled the lamps of a world latched to nights, our whole century brightened by blood.

Perhaps pain is like a name, made to sing just for you.

By Hello, we mean: Let us not say goodbye again. There is someone we would die for. Feel that fierce, unshifting truth, That braced & ready sacrifice. That’s what love does: It makes a fact faced beyond fear. We have lost too much to lose. We lean against each other again, The way water bleeds into itself. This glassed hour, paused, Bursts like a loaded star, Belonging always to us. What more must we believe in.

Fundamentally supremacism means doing anything to keep one’s soul conceit, even if it means losing one’s soul.

It means not wearing the mask that would save you, because it would mean taking off one’s privilege.

It means always choosing poisonous pride over preservation,
pride over nation,
pride over anyone or anything.

This realization is not ours.

It is.

Just like a skill or any art,
We cannot possess hope without practicing it.
It is the most fundamental craft we demand of ourselves.

When this ends, we’ll smile sweetly, finally seeing
In testing times, we became the best of beings.

Perhaps tomorrow cannot wait to be today.

We added a thousand false steps
To our walk tracker today
Because every step we’ve taken
Has required more than we had to give.

& what we share is the bark, the bones.
Paleontologists, from one fossilized femur,
Can dream up a species,
Make believe a body
Where there was none.
Our remnants are revelation,
Our requiem as raptus.
When we bend into dirt
We’re truth preserved
Without our skin.

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.

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

In history’s form, we find our own faces,
Recognizable but unremembered,
Familiar yet forgotten.

This book is full
Of ourselves. The past is one
Passionate déjà vu,
One scene already seen.

For what is a book
If not foremost a body,
Waiting & wanting —
Yearning to be whole,
Full of itself.

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 non-human 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.

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

There is no simple way to hurt.
The real damage is dammed, disrupted.
:Inaudible:
We must change
This ending in every way.

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….

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

Perhaps to burn is the most basic purification there is.
Time said you must transform to survive.
We said, not over our dead body.
What do we call a country that destroys itself just because it can?
A nation that would char rather than change.
Our only word for this is home.

These words need not be red for our blood to run through them.

Call us an exodus,
Plagued ten times over,
For all we see is red.
Intentional language, like a poem,
Is to separate our waters like a gash,
To find the sea also grieving & giving
Enough to be walked through.

Who are we, if not
What we make of the dark.

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

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

What is now dust will not return,
not the beloveds
nor their breath,
nor the sugar-crumbling glaciers,
nor the crows chewing
on their own soured song,
nor all the species
slashed
down
in one smogged swoop.

While we might feel small, separate, and all alone, our people have never been more tightly tethered. The question’s not if we will weather this unknown, but how we will weather the unknown together.

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

In this one life, we, like our joy, are fleeting but certain, abstract & absolute, ghosts who glow & glow.

We wrap our arms around ourselves, as if we can possibly hold the whole of who we are within us — everything that makes us this unearthly speck we are.

Trauma is like a season, deep & dependable, a force we board our windows against. Even when it passes, it will wail its wild way back to our porch.

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.

Despair exits us the same way it enters —
Turning through the mouth.
Even now conviction works
Strange magic on our tongues.

All that is grave need
Not be a burden, an anguish.
Call it instead, an anchor,
Grief grounding us in the sea.

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.

Grief commands its own grammar,
Structured by intimacy & imagination.

The origin of the word trauma
Is not just “wound,” but “piercing” or “turning,”
As blades do when finding home.

Non-being, i.e., distance from society — social distance — is the very heritage of the oppressed. Which means to the oppressor, social distance is a humiliation. It is to be something less than free, or worse, someone less-than-white. For what does the Karen carry but her dwindling power, dying & desperate? Dangerous & dangling like a gun hung from a tongue?

& SO It is easy to harp,
Harder to hope.
This truth, like the white-blown sky,
Can only be felt in its entirety or not at all.
The glorious was not made to be piecemeal.
Despite being drenched with dread,
This dark girl still dreams.
We smile like a sun that is never shunted.
Grief, when it goes, does so softly,
Like the exit of that breath
We just realized we clutched.

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

We wonder how close
Can we come to light
Before we shut our eyes.
How long can we stand the dark
Before we become more than our shadows.

We labor equally
When we fall as when we rise.

Meaning, we cannot stand up to police
If we cannot cease policing our imagination,
Convincing our communities that this won’t work,
When the work hasn’t even begun,
That this can wait,
When we’ve already waited out a thousand suns.
By now, we understand
That white supremacy & the despair it demands
Are as destructive as any disease.

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.

We will be protected & served
By a force that is honored & honest.
This is more than a protest,
It’s a promise.

As far away as it is,
The late sun looks
Peelable in our palm.
That is to say, distance
Renders all massiveness
Carriable.

We are desperate to flatten the curve. Oh, how we miss curving into each other.

So when you’re told that your age is reactionary,
Remind yourself that your rage is our right.

We hear men coughing
Then the stiff, loaded silence
Of coughing no more.

To be haunted is to be hunted
By a history that is still hurting.

It isn’t knowing, but remembering, that makes us create.

Poke the scar until it speaks.
This is how every memory starts.

The pain pulls us apart,
Like lips about to speak.
Without language nothing can live
At all, let alone
Beyond itself.

The funerals without families,
Weddings in waiting,
The births in isolation.
Let no one again
Have to begin, love, or end, alone.

What’s really funny about being National Youth Poet Laureate is that not everyone even knows it exists.

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.

This year the size of a sea
Sick to its stomach.
Like a page, we are only legible
When opened to one another.

Poetry is – it’s an art form, but, to me, it’s also a weapon, it’s also an instrument. It’s the ability to make ideas that have been known, felt and said. And that’s a real, I think, type of duty for the poet.

We teach children:
Leave a mark on the world.
What leads a man to shoot up
Souls but the desire to mark
Up the globe?

I hum with a hundred hearts,
Each of us lifting a hand.

I use my strengths and my smarts,
Take a knee to make a stand.

Sometimes, we must call our monster out from under the bed to see he/she/it carries our face.

We ignite not in the light, but in lack thereof,
For it is in loss that we truly learn to love.
In this chaos, we will discover clarity.
In suffering, we must find solidarity.

A virus is fought inside us,
While violence is fought amongst us.
In both, our triumph is not in conquering others,
But conquering the most destructive agents & instincts that we carry
Within our mortal forms.
Hate is a virus.
A virus demands a body.
What we mean is:
Hate only survives when hosted in humans.
If we are to give it anything,
Let it be our sorrow & never our skin.
To love just may be
The fight of our lives.

We do not hope for no reason.
Hope is the reason for itself.
We don’t care for our beloveds
For any specific, singular logic,
But, rather, for the whole of them.
That is to say,
Love is justified by loving.

We write because you might listen.

Meanwhile, for generations we’ve stayed home, [segre] gated, kept out of parks, kept out of playgrounds, kept out of pools, kept out of public spaces, kept out of outside spaces, kept out of outer space, kept out of movie theaters, kept out of malls, kept out of restrooms, kept out of restaurants, kept out of taxis, kept out of buses, kept out of beaches, kept out of ballot boxes, kept out of office, kept out of the army, kept out of the hospitals, kept out of hotels, kept out of clubs, kept out of jobs, kept out of schools, kept out of sports, kept out of streets, kept out of water, kept out of land.

Why it’s so perturbing for privileged groups to follow
restrictions of place & personhood.
Doing so means for once wearing the chains their power
has shackled on the rest of us.

It is to surrender the one difference that kept them separate & thus superior.

Last year we stepped onto an elevator.
We politely asked the white lady behind us
If she could please take the next lift
To continue social distancing.
Her face flared up like a cross in the night.
Are you kidding me? she yelled,
Like we’d just declared
Elevators for us only
Or Yous must enter from the back
Or No yous or dogs allowed
Or We have the right to refuse
Humanity to anyone.

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.

There is nothing so agonizing, or so dangerous, as a memory unexpressed, unexplored, unexplained, & unexploded. Grief is the grenade that always goes off.

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.

Again, language matters.
Children have been taught-
America: without her, democracy fails.
But the truth is:
America without her democracy fails.

Of all the stars the most beautiful
Is nothing more than a monster,
Just as starved & stranded as we are.

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

Every breath from my bronze-pounded chest we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one. We will rise from the gold-limbed hills of the West. We will rise from the wind-swept Northeast where our forefathers first realized revolution. We will rise from the Lake Rim cities of the Midwestern states. We will rise from the sun-baked South.

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.

This is the era of just redemption. We feared it at its inception. We did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour, but within it, we found the power to author a new chapter, to offer hope and laughter to ourselves so while once we asked, how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe? Now we assert, how could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?

But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated.

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

We find ourselves not by being
The most seen, but the most seeing.
We watch a toddler
Freewheel through warm grass,
Not fleeing, just running, the way rivers do,
For it is in their unfettered nature.
We smile, our whole face cleared
By that single dazzling thin.
How could we not be altered.

The Spanish Influenza did not originate in Spain. In fact the first recorded case was in the United States, in Kansas, on March 9th, 1918. Beware the Ides of March. But because Spain was neutral in World War I, it did not sensor reports of the disease to the public. To tell the truth then, is to risk being remembered by its fiction. Countless countries laid blame to one another. What the US called the Spanish Influenza, Spain called the French Flu, or the Naples Soldier. What Germans dubbed the Russian Pest, the Russians called Chinese Flu.

The only way to correctly predict
The future is to pave it,
Is to brave it.
The breakage is where we begin.
The rupture is for remembering.

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 it’s own jagged point. Tell me what is more powerful than the unerased.

The first bud of spring sings the other seeds into joining her uprising.

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.

We will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation because we know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation. Our blunders become their burdens. But one thing is certain, 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 one we were left with.

Loss is the cost of loving.

And yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine, but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect. We are striving to forge our union with purpose. To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters, and conditions of man. And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us, but what stands before us. We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside.

We will rebuild, reconcile and recover in every known nook of our nation, in every corner called our country our people diverse and beautiful will emerge battered and beautiful.

Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree and no one shall make them afraid. If we’re to live up to her own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade, but in all the bridges we’ve made. That is the promise to glade, the hill we climb if only we dare. It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit. It’s the past we step into and how we repair it. We’ve seen a forest that would shatter our nation rather than share it. Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy. This effort very nearly succeeded.

Goodbye, by which we say to another —
Thanks for offering your life into mine.
By Goodbye, we truly mean:
Let us be able to say hello again.

Anxiety is a living body, Poised beside us like a shadow. It is the last creature standing, The only beast who loves us Enough to stay.

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.

Mr. President, Dr. Biden, Madam Vice President, Mr. Emhoff, Americans and the world, when day comes we ask ourselves where can we find light in this never-ending shade? The loss we carry asea 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. We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president only to find herself reciting for one.

When day comes, we step out of the shade aflame and unafraid. The new dawn blooms as we free it. For there is always light. If only we’re brave enough to see it. If only we’re brave enough to be it.

Always remember that
What happened to us
Happened through us.

Poetry and language are often at the heartbeat of movements for change.

The oration of poetry, I consider to be its own art form and tradition.

My mom wanted to make sure I was prepared to grow up with Black skin in America.

I was writing since I can remember – I just didn’t know it was poetry yet, or that writing could be a career.

Poetry has never been the language of barriers, it’s always been the language of bridges.

The type of leadership that I like to participate in really leans into my femininity. Things like empathy, compassion, listening, tenderness, sharing power — you risk being called ‘too emotional,’ but I like to lean into those characteristics because we need to see more of that in the world.

The great responsibility I feel is to get people to put that power and that hope in themselves.

We might not be fully sure of all that we are. & yet we have endured all that we were.

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

In this truth, in this faith, we trust.
For while we have our eyes on the future,
History has its eyes on us.