The International Rescue Committee (IRC) is honoured that Amanda Gorman, the young poet who stepped onto the world stage at the inauguration of U.S. President Joe Biden, has chosen to support our work through the debut of her new poem, “A New Day’s Lyric.”

The poem bids farewell to 2021, yet another year marked by the global crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic. “I wrote A New Day’s Lyric both to celebrate the new year and honor both the hurt and the humanity of the last one,” Gorman said on Instagram.

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A post shared by Amanda Gorman (@amandascgorman)

The poem begins:

May this be the day
We come together.
Mourning, we come to mend,
Withered, we come to weather,
Torn, we come to tend,
Battered, we come to better.
Tethered by this year of yearning,
We are learning
That though we weren’t ready for this,
We have been readied by it.
We steadily vow that no matter
How we are weighed down,
We must always pave a way forward.

You can watch a video of Gorman reciting “A New Day’s Lyric,” and read the full poem in this Instagram post.

Gorman says she felt the debut of the poem could be a “great coming together moment,” which is why she is encouraging those moved by her verse to donate to the IRC’s humanitarian response around the world.

“I want to think about, how is that poem living in a certain space? And how is it, literally, paying its way forward?,” Gorman explains in an interview with Vanity Fair. “And that’s, in part, a donate-able aspect of drawing attention to the International Rescue Committee, which is doing such important work globally, but also, all the more urgently in the time of COVID.”

Learn more

The mission of the IRC is to help people whose lives and livelihoods are shattered by conflict and disaster, including the climate crisis, to survive, recover and gain control over their future.

Learn more about the IRC and our global COVID-19 response.