Amanda Gorman releases a brand new poem — ‘New Day’s Lyric’

Scottie Andrew, CNN

Poet Amanda Gorman has released a new work, just in time for the year’s end. And like her most famous poem, “The Hill We Climb,” her latest aims to uplift its listeners during a challenging time.

Gorman, the 23-year-old who recited the aforementioned poem at President Joe Biden’s inauguration, partnered with Instagram on her new composition, “New Day’s Lyric.” She said she wrote the poem to “celebrate the new year and honor the hurt & the humanity of the last one.”

Instagram shared a video of Gorman reciting the poem inside an empty theater.

“This hope is our door, our portal,” Gorman recited in the first minute of the two-and-a-half minute composition. “Even if we never get back to normal, someday we can venture beyond it, to leave the known and take the first steps. So let us not return to what was normal, but reach toward what is next.”

To “pay [her] words forward,” Gorman said in an Instagram post that she’s raising funds for the International Rescue Committee, an organization that aids people affected by humanitarian crises, including the Covid-19 pandemic.

In an interview with Vanity Fair ahead of the poem’s release, Gorman said her newest poem was partly inspired by the stories of grief and perseverance she’s seen shared on social media, so it was fitting, she said, that she published it on such a platform, too.

Earlier in December, Gorman — who became the first national youth poet laureate in 2017 — published the poetry collection “Call Us What We Carry,” which has appeared on the New York Times Best Sellers list for two weeks. And after her star turn at the inauguration in January, she wrote and performed a poem for the Super Bowl the following month, titled “Chorus of the Captains.”

Read on for Gorman’s full poem, transcribed by Instagram:

May this be the day

We come together.

Mourning, we come to mend,

Withered, we come to weather,

Torn, we come to tend,

Battered, we come to better.

Tethered by this year of yearning,

We are learning

That though we weren’t ready for this,

We have been readied by it.

We steadily vow that no matter

How we are weighed down,

We must always pave a way forward.

*

This hope is our door, our portal.

Even if we never get back to normal,

Someday we can venture beyond it,

To leave the known and take the first steps.

So let us not return to what was normal,

But reach toward what is next.

*

What was cursed, we will cure.

What was plagued, we will prove pure.

Where we tend to argue, we will try to agree,

Those fortunes we forswore, now the future we foresee,

Where we weren’t aware, we’re now awake;

Those moments we missed

Are now these moments we make,

The moments we meet,

And our hearts, once all together beaten,

Now all together beat.

*

Come, look up with kindness yet,

For even solace can be sourced from sorrow.

We remember, not just for the sake of yesterday,

But to take on tomorrow.

*

We heed this old spirit,

In a new day’s lyric,

In our hearts, we hear it:

For auld lang syne, my dear,

For auld lang syne.

Be bold, sang Time this year,

Be bold, sang Time,

For when you honor yesterday,

Tomorrow ye will find.

Know what we’ve fought

Need not be forgot nor for none.

It defines us, binds us as one,

Come over, join this day just begun.

For wherever we come together,

We will forever overcome.

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