She Prays for Resurrection

Amanda Gorman is the Inaugural Youth Poet Laureate of the United States and Founder of Onepenonepage.org. Her first collection of poetry, entitled “The One for Whom Food Is Not Enough”, was published by Penmanship Books in 2015, and her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, and award-winning anthologies.

She Prays for Resurrection

And the wolf will dwell with the lamb, and the leopard will lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a child will lead them. Isaiah 11:6.

I am a hopeless romantic.

I long for you to pour love into the pocket

That was chiseled into my ribcage.

Is it wrong to hope someone will help heal me,

Rather than just doing it all myself?

Is it wrong to love the same type of creature

That tore me apart?

I am the world’s worst feminist, but many broken girls have to be.

Crawl inside me and mend the tinned roof;

Sew my arms back into their sockets;

Scream with the beating of these waves

To remind my heart to palpitate again.

Make me human again where man made me dust.

I am terrified of man.

Men were once my greatest night terrors

But I pray to day-dream of you,

Brown eyes reminding me I am my own wonder.

You smile, and the glory in your mouth

Flushes out the beasts in mine like holy water.

Your strong fingers grip book’s spine,

And I imagine them around my own.

I know intuitively that you can break me.

Men breaking bread and breaking women

at the table is my family’s oldest of customs.

Instead you rest your palm gently on the table between us,

Fingers splayed wide and unasking, as if on the back of a coughing infant.

And just like that I begin to believe again

That maybe I can find someone

Who knows how to love the love

Back into me.