“When day comes we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade?”

As we ushered in the New Year, it felt as though there was not much to celebrate. 2020 had left many exhausted, isolated, and disheartened. Over the course of a year, the Covid-19 pandemic had ravaged the country, killing over 400,000 people. Frustrated with the lack of institutional accountability after the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, millions took to the streets to protest in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. And in just the past few months, the U.S. had been locked in a partisan battle over the results of the 2020 election, in which President Trump and his allies disregarded fact for fiction, refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. This political tension ultimately culminated in the violent attack on the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, which forced us to reckon with the ugly realities of White supremacy and extremism as they desecrated the National Mall. 

 In homes across the U.S. and around the globe, President Biden’s inauguration was broadcast against this backdrop, as the nation grappled with unprecedented civil, economic, and political strife. And yet as Inaugural Poet Amanda Gorman stepped up to the lectern on January 20th, 2021, she instilled in millions watching a sentiment which had recently seemed so elusive: hope. 

At the age of 22, the Los Angeles native and first-ever National Youth Poet Laureate followed in the footsteps of past Inaugural poets like Maya Angelou, Richard Blanco, and Elizabeth Alexander. Gorman had been interested in poetry from a young age and she became the first Youth Poet Laureate of Los Angeles at only 16. Just one year later, she published her first book of poetry entitled The One for Whom is Not Enough. Throughout her career, Gorman has focused her poetry on themes of social justice, often writing about race and gender as a Black woman in the US. Through her platform, Gorman has sought to make creative writing more accessible to the youth through her organization, One Pen One Page, which provides writing workshops to underserved communities. 

As Gorman prepared her remarks for the inauguration, she wanted to voice a message of unity, while also acknowledging the pain the country had endured over the past few months. “In my poem, I’m not going to in any way gloss over what we’ve seen over the past few weeks and, dare I say, the past few years. But what I really aspire to do in the poem is to be able to use my words to envision a way in which our country can still come together and can still heal,” she said in an interview with the New York Times.  

If John Winthrop envisioned the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 as a “city upon a hill,” an example to the rest of the world, Amanda Gorman with her title “The Hill We Climb” reminds us that the work is still in progress. We are still “[climbing]” to meet the ideals of freedom and equality in 2021, to know that “the norms and notions of what just is”—police brutality, nativism, and White supremacy—“isn’t always justice.” As Gorman asks us to “lift our gaze not to what stands between us, / But what stands before us,” she calls on us to unite to carry out the work that still needs to be done, to repair “a country that is bruised but whole.” 

And while political leaders like Trump have often espoused patriotism while erasing the painful legacy of enslavement and colonization in the U.S., Gorman seeks to redefine what patriotism means. Instead of blind loyalty, she says, “...being American is more than a pride we inherit, / It’s the past we step into and how we repair it.” “Being American,” she says, is to “merge mercy with might and might with right,” to “leave behind a country better than the one we were left” for future generations to come.

As millions crowded around laptops, phones, and television screens, Gorman ended her poem with a final rallying cry: “For there is always light if only we’re brave enough to see it, / If only we’re brave enough to be it.”