No Pressure
See the light. Be the light. No pressure.
Ha!
Four hundred years of injustice laid out in just over five minutes, laid out for a nation to contemplate.
“Who is this person?” I think as I watch the day unfold.
The youth poet laureate later describes to reporters her receiving the invitation in late December. An invitation to write something meaningful for an inauguration that could define who we might be for the next four hundred years. Then recite it on live TV, to millions or people worldwide.
“No pressure,” she said, laughing.
“I had this huge thing, one of the most important things I’ll even do in my career. I was like if I try to climb thin mountain all at once, I’m just going to pass out.” She said. So she wrote a few lines a day.
“I did a lot of research ever since I found out I was going to be the inaugural poet, and I was about half way through when the January 6th insurrection happened,” Amanda Gorman tells Anderson Cooper the day after her reading.
“It energize me to believe in a message of hope, unity and healing,” she concluded. “That was the type of poem that I needed to write, and the type of poem that the nation and the world needed to hear.”
I came to the day with great expectation. Angry at having spent the last four years under the darkness she would speak about. Angry, but hopeful. I came to the day afraid that something terrible might happen, but upbeat about the possibility that it might not. Came to the day knowing that everything might be different soon. I certainly didn’t come to the day thinking I would cry when Lady Gaga sang national anthem, but I was wrong.
Yes, I cried when Stefani Germanotta hit the high notes.
I cried when Jennifer Lopez sang America the Beautiful, and I smiled when she turned and recited the pledge of allegiance in Spanish, even if I didn’t know what she was saying at the time.
“Una nación, bajo Dios, indivisible, con libertad y justicia para todos,”
I cried when Kamala Harris put her hand on the bible.
I cried at the thought that we’d survived, not a war, but close. The destruction potentially as devastating. The carnage equally great.
Then came Amanda.
Who are you? I thought. Where did you come from?
“Her teachers are not surprised,” we read. A supernova, whose words and presentation will inspire millions to write.
“Words matter,” she tells us in post inaugural interview in the New York Times.
Her hands a performance too. Her moment lifts a nation out of the darkness. And her call, oh her call.
“Hope isn’t something that we ask of others, it’s something we have to demand of ourselves,” she says, as if whispering back in time to all who have gone before.
A nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished.
Her call as powerful as Martin Luther King’s dream, shared some fifty years past, the two of them seemingly in conversation from one end of the National Mall to the other. Two agents of God, sent here to remind us of the work.
“Work together. Pray together. Struggle together… climb together.” he said then.
For there is always light. Amanda continues now.
“We will not settle for gradualism,” King first said, and Ibram X Kendi repeated earlier in the week during Monday’s MLK celebration. Timely alignment of the stars, and the moment, like a once in a century celestial event. Shade from an eclipse finally passing.
A nation unfinished. Her people all equal. Declared by all three in some form, King, Kendi, Gorman.
We the people!
It’s not Biden’s job alone to fix this mess. Not Kamala’s job to put out the fire. We will rise… Amanda reads.
Be not silent! their words, now joined.
The very same feeling that came over me four years ago during the Women’s March, when we joined in singing Amazing Grace as if swimming along in a sea of hope and protest, I feel again, my stroke found in the collective voice of the crowd. The same feeling that hit me when Barack first spoke to the nation at the Democratic Convention, he then just an up-and-coming spirit.
“He’s going to be president,” we all said to ourselves.
“Maybe she will be as well,” I think now.
We are sure to see Amanda again, and again. In our thoughts. In our dreams. In our conviction to stand up and see the light. Be the light.
Taking her advice, I will have to break this up into smaller bits for fear of being overwhelmed by the sheer size of the challenge.
What will I do today?
See.
Write.
Post.
Unafraid.
It is time to be not silent and join the fight that delivers equality for all.
When the day comes we step out of the shade.
See the light. Be the light. No pressure.
