Five years ago I wrote a post for Slant entitled “‘We,’ the Inaugural Pronoun.” It was a close reading of the poem Amanda Gorman proclaimed for Joe Biden’s inauguration, the poem entitled “The Hill We Climb.” I tried in the post to describe the beautifully elastic way Gorman stretches that pronoun “we” to bind us all into one people, one nation, e pluribus unum, despite the powerful forces, from within and without, seeking to fracture us, to scatter us to the winds. And it was indeed a windy cold day in D.C., but a hopeful day and hopeful time nonetheless, when Gorman, dressed in warm, eye-catching yellow and red—young, clear-eyed, fearless, determined—took the world stage. “We” seemed, at that moment, almost able to see what she saw, what we saw in her, and for a moment in each other: a vision of what this country could become, what its promise had always said we were: “We the people….”
Now, five years later, Amanda Gorman continues to evoke that “we.” And she does so now in another season of windy, icy cold—on the streets of Minnesota. Not in a hopeful time, though, but in a time of grief, fear, and outrage at I.C.E.’s icy brutality towards the members of the “homeland” it claims to secure—towards Renee Good, towards Alex Pretti, towards all of “us.” But in her poetic tributes to those two brave souls, which she posted on social media, Gorman’s “we” is as clear and strong as ever, maybe clearer and stronger than ever because of the extent to which I.C.E. is testing it. Let’s look first at Gorman’s poem on Renee Good:
For Renee Nicole Good
Killed by I.C.E. on January 7, 2026
They say she is no more, That there her absence roars, Blood-blown like a rose. Ice-wheels flinched & 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 on the edge of the crooked crater Of the worst of what we’ve been.
Change is only possible & all the greater, When the labor & bitter anger of our neighbors Is moved by the love & better angels of our nature.
What they call death & void, We know is breath & voice; 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 be fully gone, When they forever are so fiercely Good.
I imagine hearing Gorman recite this tightly metered dramatic poem, this succession of variously rhyming short lines moving us from darkness to light, from despair to affirmation, as I still hear her reciting her expansive, ebullient inaugural poem from years ago. Now, as then, each word is meant to be heard, absorbed, allowed to grow in meaning with her listeners. But now the verse form is more deliberate, moving carefully through five compact stanzas, from our grief at her death to her rising among us as one of our “bright-fled angels.” We are forced to listen carefully, slowly, meditatively as the poet brings us from the hopelessness voiced by the “They” of the poem’s first line to the triumphant stress on the name “Good” in its last line. In the process, “we” reemerges as all-inclusive, even of Renee’s killers, “the worst of what we’ve been” and of “our enormity.” “We the people…” must embrace all of us or it embraces emptiness.
Gorman’s poem on Alex Pretti—
For Alex Jeffrey Pretti
Murdered by I.C.E. January 24, 2026
—reflects a calmer but no less determined mood, and is especially striking because the poem exists in two forms. One form is left-margin-justified, creating a strong emphasis on each short line:
We wake with no words, just woe & wound. Our own country shooting us in the back is not just brutality; 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 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 belove this world waiting, 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.
In this form, the stresses fall, at the beginning, in pairs, heavily, accented at the start by the “w” sounds, beginning with “We” itself. “We” then slides into “wake,” then into “words,” but also into “woe & wound,” reminding us that “we” must contain and transform what threatens us. “We” can build a world that can hold us together, even in the face of the brutal contradiction of a “message” threatening death as a consequence of love.
The other form is that of the shape-poem (a poem whose visible shape enhances the meaning the poem is intended to convey). This complete version of the poem, below, as Gorman says in an Instagram post, has a “verse structure inspired by the shape of Minneapolis.”
For Alex Jeffrey Pretti
Murdered by I.C.E. January 24, 2026
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 those without papers, but those without conscience. Know that to care so intensively, united, is to carry both pain-dark horror for today & be a profound, daring hope for tomorrow. We can feel we have nothing to give, & still belove 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.
By recasting the poem as a shape-poem, Gorman seems to want to highlight Minnesota’s special suffering as synecdoche for our entire nation’s suffering under the rule of “those”— not “us”— who “never look within.” I can appreciate such a reshaping, yet still feel the loss of accent on Alex Pretti’s suffering and death as the latest individual embodiment of that suffering and death. But what the poem might lose in expressive power by such treatment, it gains in the broader symbolic result.
Yet in either form, the poem— unlike Gorman’s elegy for Renee Good— allows “we” to speak firmly from the beginning. It is as if, after the murder of Renee Good, “we” have become, not inured to the brutality of I.C.E., but less vulnerable to its worst effects— of its causing despair, hopelessness, loss of a “we.” Now “we” can speak to each other again, confident that there is an “us” to whom we speak. But “we” pay a cost here. Our “we” now must recognize a tragic dilemma forced upon us by I.C.E. It is the dilemma of having to acknowledge for the first time a “they” — “those among us / who never look within /… those without conscience.” These “They” are “among us,” but not of us.
Five years since Biden’s inauguration have changed “us.” Amanda Gorman is brave enough to acknowledge that hard fact. And so must we.
After getting his PhD in English literature, George Dardess taught close reading to his own students until his retirement. Since then he has been ordained a Deacon in the Roman Catholic Church and written several books on Muslim-Christian relations. He has also created the graphic novel Foreign Exchange.
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