Day 831, Quasi-Quarantine: "Call Us What We Carry" Sets A Shared Pandemic To Verse

"There was another gap that choked us:

The simple gift of farewell.

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."

~"Fugue"

The immensely talented Amanda Gorman is back with heady, elegant thoughts on COVID-19, collective memory, and inequality. Several entries cleverly use type to make shapes that support the poems' themes, and others play with techniques such as anaphora, parallelism, and erasure.

"We stumbled, sick with shame, groping for each other

in that heaving black. We were mouthless for months.

We could've been grinning. We could've been grimacing.

We could've been glass & so, we must ask:

Who were we beneath our mask.

What are we now that it is trashed."

~"ANONYMOUS"

"Call Us What We Carry" is a beautiful, intense, gutting collection of poems from one of our most important contemporary voices in American literature.

"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.

Pay attention.

Concern is the debt

We always owed each other."

~"In the Deep"