Amanda Gorman was about halfway through writing the poem that she’ll deliver at President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration next week when she watched in horror the deadly siege on the US Capitol.
Typically, it takes the nation’s first-ever youth poet laureate days to craft a new poem. She finished this one immediately.
“It was like someone pressed the on-switch in my brain,” Gorman told CNN Friday. “I finished the rest at home that night.”
Come Wednesday, Gorman will participate in a ceremony whose theme has long been billed as a call to national unity — a plea made ever more urgent after last week’s violence and a nation riven by political divisions and struggling with the ongoing pandemic. Those thoughts will be with the 22-year-old Gorman as she speaks.
“As I was crafting this piece, it was really trying to communicate a message of joining together and crossing divides,” Gorman said. She believes Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will “spearhead a new chapter in America, which we so desperately need — one of dignity, and integrity, and hope and unity, because there’s a lot that needs to get done and a lot that needs to be fixed. And I think that they’re the people to do it.”