San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Wrestling with darkness, lifted by promise
She will always be 22. Long after she’s surpassed the age of the man for whose inauguration she recited, long after, perhaps, another young poet has spoken at her own inauguration, long after she’s climbed the hill that, by then, will be a mountain of accomplishments and accolades, Amanda Gorman will always appear in our minds as we first saw her. She’ll forever be the 22-year-old who stepped out of the shade of relative obscurity to stop the world with a poem.
At 16, this daughter of a single mother was named the youth poet laureate of Los Angeles. At 19, while studying at Harvard, she became the United States’ first national youth poet laureate. Now, she was doing what Robert Frost, Maya Angelou and other inaugural poets have done, reminding us of the beauty, power and necessity of poetry.
In Ephesians 6:12, St. Paul writes, “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”
For nearly six minutes, Gorman, as poised and lyrical as her words, possessing a presence that amplified and deepened her message, wrestled with the world’s ancient darkness and this nation’s recent spiritual wickedness. She reminded us, we the people of this nation, of its unfulfilled promises and promise, and of our awesome capacity to love, be merciful and be better to
each other as we nurture the dreams of who we aspire to be, who we can be, who we truly are.
So, let us leave behind a country better than the one we were left with
Every breath from my bronzepounded chest,
we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one
Wednesday was a day of cleansing and renewal of purpose, one that will be remembered for President Joe Biden’s and Gorman’s remarkable psalms for unity. Psalms delivered eloquently by a president and poet who overcame speech impediments to make their voices the clearest ones that day.
Standing at the Capitol, Kamala Harris took the oath of vice president looking like no other person who’d taken that oath, while Gorman, standing in the same place, looked like the enslaved Americans who helped build that Capitol and the White House. Enslaved Americans who toiled to build the symbols of a democracy denied to them but whose spirits gathered on those steps Wednesday to watch those two women stand on what they’d built, freeing their spirits to smile and say what they dared not say when they walked the earth: Black is beautiful.
Black is power.
Black is poetry.
Black is love.
Gorman was born on the 33rd anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” the day in Selma, Ala., when Black Americans nonviolently marching to expand democracy were beaten by law enforcement officers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
If we're to live up to our own time
Then victory won't lie in the blade
But in all the bridges we've made
That is the promised glade The hill we climb
If only we dare
She finished her poem after seeing the Jan. 6 insurrection in which a mob that included white nationalists tried to overturn democracy by overpowering and beating law enforcement officers at the U.S. Capitol.
The insurrection didn’t dampen Gorman’s faith in this nation to do what is right and just, a nation whose president she aspires to be in 2036. It was reaffirmed.
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 force that would shatter our nation rather than share it
Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy
And this effort very nearly succeeded
But while democracy can be periodically delayed
it can never be permanently defeated.