What we call occasional poetry—verse written for or about an event, often ceremonial—reminds us that all poems have occasions, or should. Good poems capture a moment and sustain it. In an era as urgent as ours, many poems strive for timelessness precisely by being timely. Poetry can preserve the fleeting present, encircle the past, and help envision alternative futures.
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.
Gorman continues to explore the “we” further in her new collection, “Call Us What We Carry,” which she calls an “occasional book”—one framed by our many mutating yet seemingly immutable pandemics, from COVID-19 and racism to climate catastrophes and a general malaise. In “penning a letter to the world as a daughter of it,” Gorman doesn’t merely transcribe a diary of a plague year; her bold, oracular pronouncements bear witness to collective experience, with an uncanny confidence and a prescient tone that are all the poet’s own. By turns devotional and pushing the limits of the page, many poems in the book play with form—appearing as questionnaires and text-message conversations, or taking on the shapes of an urn, a whale, a flag—in ways reminiscent of George Herbert or the concrete poets of the nineteen-sixties, another tempestuous time in search of fixity. Gorman insists that “We are not me— / We are we,” and her poetry is unafraid to name all that we carry. “Our scars,” she writes, “are the brightest / Parts of us.”
—Kevin Young
SHIP’S MANIFEST
Content
Read by the author.
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
Content
Read by the author.
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
Content
Read by the author.
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.
LUCENT
Content
Read by the author.
What would we seem, stripped down
Like a wintered tree.
Glossy scabs, tight-raised skin,
These can look silver in certain moonlights.
In other words,
Our scars are the brightest
Parts of us.
* * *
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.
* * *
& 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.
* * *
Lumen means both the cavity
Of an organ, literally an opening,
& a unit of luminous flux,
Literally, a measurement of how lit
The source is. Illuminate us.
That is, we, too,
Are this bodied unit of flare,
The gap for lux to breach.
* * *
Sorry, must’ve been the light
Playing tricks on us, we say,
Knuckling our eyelids.
But perhaps it is we who make
Falsities of luminescence—
Our shadows playing tricks on stars.
Every time their gazes tug down,
They think us monsters, then men,
Predators, then persons again,
Beasts, then beings,
Horrors, & then humans.
Of all the stars the most beautiful
Is nothing more than a monster,
Just as starved & stranded as we are.
BACK TO THE PAST
Content
Read by the author.
At times even blessings will bleed us.
There are some who lost their lives
& those who were lost from ours,
Who we might now reënter,
All our someones summoned softly.
The closest we get to time travel
Is our fears softening,
Our hurts unclenching,
As we become more akin
To kin, as we return
To who we were
Before we actually were
Anything or anyone—
That is, when we were born unhating
& unhindered, howling wetly
With everything we could yet become.
To travel back in time is to remember
When all we knew of ourselves was love.
This excerpt is drawn from “Call Us What We Carry,” by Amanda Gorman, and her readings from the audiobook edition, out in December from Penguin Random House.
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