Words: The Business That Matters Most

Amanda Gorman’s poetry has arrested the American imagination making it dream of better than what it has become. She has sent a rallying cry to her fellow citizens to not let “unfinished” fray to undone. The unity of the United States has and always will be the most important business for the nation’s future.

I make my initial remarks to justify my choice of paying tribute to a poet as my entry in the “Black in Business Challenge.” Artistic brilliance and the serious business of nation-building combine in the prodigious talent that is Amanda Gorman.

The business of words is unquantifiable. It is as immeasurable as imagination itself. Words reach out, speak on a breath or in sign, they are scribbled on a piece of paper, written in the sand, on the street or upon the sky itself. Words are the most essential trade. They are the witnesses of the notions we have taken most to heart, the values and dreams that represent who we are and where we are going. Before and at the beginning, there are always words. As actions playout, words punctuate the passing time. And after actions cease, words become the literal brandings of the stories that make history. Each word is a story in itself. Each phrase and sentence are storyfully woven.

Stories are the creations of chosen words, those words we choose to commit to mind. They are some of the few, inspired alphabetic constructions that have been victorious in the battle against the noise in which we live. They have cut through. This can be said most emphatically concerning Amanda Gorman’s poetry. And so, I say that right now, in America, words are the most significant business.

A legacy stretches back to when a girl who came to be named Phyllis Wheatley came to America as a slave. She not only found a way to correspond with and meet the first President of the United States, George Washington, but was also the first woman of colour to have her literary work published. In the spirit of this history Amanda Gorman can be seen as the young woman who has taken up the baton of this most crucial business of words begun back then. Phyllis was writing while the nation was still in its infancy hailing America as victorious ‘Columbia’ and exhorting “The generous Spirit that Columbia fires” in her 64-line poem entitled Liberty and Peace. And, now in 2021, we have Amanda Gorman “a skinny Black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother” who can dream of becoming president and found herself reciting for one.

Of Amanda Gorman’s ability to express the American imagination, Phyllis Wheatley would surely have exclaimed in the words of her own poetry:

“Imagination! who can sing thy force?

Or who describe the swiftness of thy course?

Soaring through air to find the bright abode”

Phyllis Wheatley was there at the beginning, writing words that captured the unitary sentiments of citizens following the heart-breaking glory of the revolutionary war. Now Amanda writes and reaches where other types of business and good intentions cannot penetrate. Her words have captured hearts, healed them and make them beat in unison once again.

In her poem The Hill We Climb, we heard and read the only type of business that can wrench people from the despondency of misery and division:

We will rise from the gold-limbed hills of the west.

We will rise from the windswept northeast,

where our forefathers first realized revolution.

We will rise from the lake-rimmed cities of the midwestern states.

We will rise from the sunbaked south.

We will rebuild, reconcile and recover.

In the business of nation-building, together Phyllis Wheatley and Amanda Gorman’s talent as wordsmiths straddles the centuries of America’s history, demonstrating that words wield unfathomable power. Without words to stoke the fire of patriotism, there is no shared goal -

We are striving to forge a union with purpose,

to compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and

conditions of man.

And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us,

but what stands before us.

There can be no unity -

A country that is bruised but whole,

benevolent but bold,

fierce and free.

And peace is impossible -

It's because being American is more than a pride we inherit,

it's the past we step into

and how we repair it.

And so, I ask you to toast Amanda Gorman and all the ladies of colour throughout history who have waged war with their words for the purpose of peace and unity.