Credit: Newsday via Getty Images This Is Our Dream : A Crowdsourced Poem To Inspire Hope Jan 28, 2021
Poetry can help us become more human. We saw it on display as 22-year-old inaugural poet Amanda Gorman read her stirring poem The Hill We Climb last week. It felt joyous and truthful, necessary and hopeful, and there was power in both her and her words.
Gorman s Inauguration Day poem no doubt helped inspire submissions to Morning Edition s most recent poetry callout. Days before she read those lines, Kwame Alexander, NPR s poet in residence, asked for poetry that starts with the words I dream a world. That line comes from a poem by Langston Hughes and it inspired Martin Luther King Jr. s I Have A Dream speech.
And the earth is cared for by all.
Where nations boundaries blur
reaching across to embrace in oneness.
Where people are as free
as the poet s meter.
And inclusion is real
Where I can be black and woman, and be safe
I dream a world where white folks see
All non-white folks in the land of the free
As true heirs to the founders liberty
From oppression and powerful tyranny;
I dream the world, king dreamed for me
That the paved gold that America promises prospers
Where the playing field is level, the same,
for anyone willing and able.
where we anchor to hope and all it brings