Amanda Gorman Shares Powerful Poem In Response To Uvalde School Shooting
The 24-year-old poet and activist posted her resounding words on social media.
Like many did following news of another mass shooting, poet and activist Amanda Gorman took to social media to share a few searing words on the issue of gun control in America.
The 24-year-old — the first National Youth Poet Laureate who delivered her brilliant work "The Hill We Climb" at the inauguration President Joe Biden — shared a poem and three follow-up tweets about the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, which took the lives of 19 students and two teachers on Tuesday.
The poem reads:
Schools scared to death.
The truth is, one education under
desks,
Stooped low from bullets;
That plunge when we ask
Where our children
Shall live
& how
& if
“It takes a monster to kill children. But to watch monsters kill children again and again and do nothing isn’t just insanity—it’s inhumanity,” she posted as a companion tweet.
Gorman also shared two more posts, seemingly about gun control laws, reading, “The truth is, one nation under guns” and “What might we be if only we tried. What might we become if only we’d listen.”
Those words are reminiscent of the last line of her inaugural poem, which read, “For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it. If only we’re brave enough to be it.”
“It’s quite easy when you turn on the news to see a world that is vengeful and scarred and poisoned,” Gorman told Variety last year. “That’s what gets the shares, the headlines. … But as much evil as I see, there is far more good. I just have to make myself willing and open to seeing it.”
After skyrocketing to international fame as the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history, Gorman performed a poem at the 2021 Super Bowl, was on the cover of Vogue and was a co-chair of the Met Gala last September. She recently made a multi-year partnership with beauty brand Estée Lauder, working on a $3 million initiative called “Writing Change,” with the focus of advancing literacy “as a pathway to equality, access, and social change.”
Gorman often writes about underrepresented and marginalized communities, and her words reverberate in times of darkness. Her latest poem in response to the Uvalde tragedy is no different.
