Amanda Gorman releases new poem in the wake of Uvalde massacre
LOS ANGELES — A new poem from former National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman tackles the recent mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, the latest in a series of strong reactions from the young Catholic-raised activist to gun violence.
Entitled “Hymn for the Hurting”, the five-stanza offering was published in the New York Times on Friday evening in the paper’s opinion section.
“Everything hurts, Our hearts shadowed and strange, Minds made muddied and mute,” its opening lines read.
“We carry tragedy, terrifying and true. And yet none of it is new.”
Here is a new poem from @TheAmandaGorman, “Hymn for the Hurting” — written after the mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, this week. https://t.co/B0A4Hto7zK
— New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) May 27, 2022
The work is one of two poems released by Gorman in the wake of the Uvalda tragedy, in which 18-year-old Salvador Ramos killed 19 students and two teachers on Tuesday at Robb Elementary School after taking the life of his own grandmother.
Just hours after the news broke, Gorman responded with a series of tweets, including a short, untitled stanza on school shootings—27 of which have occurred already this year.
“Schools scared to death. The truth is, one education under desks,” she wrote.
“The truth is, one nation under guns.”
A follow-up tweet to the poem, describing legislative inaction on gun control as “inhumanity”, has garnered more than 800,000 reactions as of Saturday morning.
Schools scared to death.
— Amanda Gorman (@TheAmandaGorman) May 24, 2022
The truth is, one education under desks,
Stooped low from bullets;
That plunge when we ask
Where our children
Shall live
& how
& if
The truth is, one nation under guns.
— Amanda Gorman (@TheAmandaGorman) May 24, 2022
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.
— Amanda Gorman (@TheAmandaGorman) May 24, 2022
Ten days prior to the Uvalde shooting, another massacre occurred in Buffalo, New York, where 10 African Americans were gunned down by an 18-year-old White Supremacist in a grocery store.
Gorman also spoke out then, just days after news broke that she will be writing the foreword for a new printing of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech—perhaps the best-known work in world history dealing with anti-Black racism.
Who else shall we let perish
— Amanda Gorman (@TheAmandaGorman) May 15, 2022
In the wake of the two shootings, Gorman also promoted a fundraiser from Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit gun control advocacy group founded in New York in 2013. The effort raised more than half a million dollars within a day of the Uvalde massacre, and nearly doubled that by Thursday morning.
The total currently stands at more than $970,000 toward a million-dollar goal, and more than 30,000 donors have contributed.
Y’all we have raised almost 1 MILLION dollars for @everytown to help end gun violence in just 2 days. This is what the beginning of change looks like. Let’s keep giving https://t.co/1HXsp0oBGH https://t.co/WcFw2EBi6S
— Amanda Gorman (@TheAmandaGorman) May 26, 2022
Nate Tinner-Williams is co-founder and editor of Black Catholic Messenger, a seminarian with the Josephites, and a ThM student with the Institute for Black Catholic Studies at Xavier University of Louisiana (XULA).