PANDEMIC DIARY

AMANDA GORMAN
January 21, 2021

Maybe this is a male thing. For that I sincerely apologize. I have neither been proficient or clever enough at screening my feelings. Nor do I embarrass readily, leaving others to ‘opinionize’ and struggle with issues of political and social correctness. It is not that I am shameless, rather I think I may say things that others think but won’t say. This is a case in point. Amanda Gorman. It is not that I did not hear her heart first and foremost. It is not that I wasn’t struck by her easy intelligence or moved by her profound social insights. I was aware, who could not be, that Ms. Gorman represents the best of a poetic experience - lyrical, articulate, logical, musical, engaging and building crescendo-like to a worthy and memorable climax. All that is true.

But, never hearing of her; never having heard her name spoken; never having seen her; never having watched her ‘perform’, it was love at first sight. Ms. Gorman vibrated vibrancy; a youthful (not naive) sense of hope; a vision, not dispersed or scattered, rather collected and formulated foreseeable. Her graceful gestures of hands rolled like water; her rhythm galloped like Queen’s horses; her ability to soften the emphatic and emphasize the enduring. All these qualities of a life lived, not one yet to be lived; of a life’s worth of experience, not mere experience that informs life to come. Gorman is a phenomenon. Able to learn from the works of Langston Hughes, Nikki Giovanni, Robert Hayden, Phyllis Wheatley, Lin Manuel Miranda and deliver to the beat of a ‘poetry slam’. She delivered generations of suffering in a golden goblet of words poised on the silken cloth of time.

Dare I say she is beautiful? May I say that? Of course I can…and will. Her face lights up with grace and hope. Her enthusiasm is polished. Her bows filled with humility and gratitude. All this appropriately distracts from her driving ambition, an aspiration to be of service, to see justice done so that justice…just is. Her possibilities excited me to no end. Kamala Harris had to wait and oblige the power structure for so many years to become “the first” - the first female Vice-President; the first Asian-American Vice-President; the first Black Vice-President. And here, at 22 years, Amanda Gorman is the first Youth National Poet Laureate.

What can I say? I am a sucker for beauty in all its forms. And, shame on me for falling heads over heels for her smile, her warmth and generosity. I will look forward to more of her work. I hope to watch her grow and contribute. To see what more she has in store.