We highlight not only Amanda Gorman as a Catholic woman of note, but our own villagers at Kenton Women’s Village and the ladies who are part of our Housing Transitions Program. They are seeking to make the move from homelessness to stability and are climbing hills with great zeal.
Poet Amanda Gorman is a member of St. Brigid Catholic Parish in South Central Los Angeles. There, she sang in the youth choir, took her sacraments and recited her poetry. She graduated from Harvard in 2020.
For International Women’s Day, here’s our favorite bite from her much longer poem “The Hill We Climb.” She has said she wrote it to inspire young people to know they are alive at a historic time.
We highlight not only Gorman as a Catholic 
woman of note, but our own villagers at Kenton Women’s Village and the ladies who are part of our Housing Transitions Program. They are seeking to make the move from homelessness to stability and are climbing hills with great zeal.
As Gorman writes of our nation, so too for all individual lives: We are “not broken but simply unfinished.”
An excerpt from “The Hill We Climb” by Amanda Gorman:
When day comes we ask ourselves,
where can we find light in this never-ending shade?
The loss we carry,
a sea we must wade
We’ve braved the belly of the beast
We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace
And the norms and notions
of what just is
Isn’t always just-ice
And yet the dawn is ours
before we knew it
Somehow we do it
Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed
a nation that isn’t broken
but simply unfinished.