Amanda Gorman, National Youth Poet Laureate, composed two powerful poems for Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good after their murders at the hands of Cankles’ and Noem’s ICEstapo:
For Alex Jeffrey Pretti
" We wake with
no words, just woe
& wound. Our own country shoot
ing us in the back is not just
brutal
ity; it’s jarring betrayal; not enforcement,
but execution. A message: Love your people & you
will die. Yet our greatest threat isn’t the outsiders
among us, but
those among us who never look
within. Fear not the those without papers, but those
without
conscience. Know that to care intensively,
united, is to carry both
pain-dark horror for today
& a profound, daring hope for tomorrow. We can feel
we have nothing to give, & still be love
this world wait
ing, trembling to change. If we cannot find words, may
we find the will; if we ever
lose hope, may we never lose our
humanity.
The only undying thing is mercy, the courage to open
ourselves
like doors, hug our neighbor,
& save one more bright, impossible life.”
For Renee Nicole Good "They say she is no more, That there her absence roars, Blood-blown like a rose. Iced wheels flinched and froze. Now, bare riot of candles, Dark fury of flowers, Pure howling of hymns.
If for us she arose, Somewhere, in the pitched deep of our grief, Crouches our power, The howl where we begin, Straining upon the edge of the crooked crater, Of the worst of what we've been.
Change is only possible, & all the greater, When the labour & bitter anger of our neighbors Is moved by the love & better nature of our angels.
What they call death & void, We know as breath & void; In the end, gorgeously Endures our enormity.
You could believe departed to be the dawn When the blank night has so long stood. But our bright-fled angels will never fully be gone, When they forever are so fiercely Good."
She’s speaking for, and to, all of us.
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