Happy New Year. I hope 2026 is better for all of us, individually and collectively.
I watched the inauguration of Mayor Mamdani on New Year’s Day, and Cornelius Eady’s poem really stood out to me. I read it as a poem about transformation, and as a love letter to those of us who feel like we don’t fit in anywhere, and a love letter to New York. I read it as the beginning of a roadmap for how we can make things better.
Listening to Cornelius Eady reminded me of listening to Maya Angelou reading her poem, On the Pulse of Morning, or Amanda Gorman’s poem, The Hill We Climb. So many of us think we don’t understand poetry, but these poems really capture the pulse of a moment. They are important.
So I share with you these words that inspired me and gave me hope. (I took a little poetic license with the spacing.)
Proof – by Cornelius Eady
You have to imagine it.
Who said you were too dark, too large, too queer, too loud?
Who said you were too poor, too strange, too fat?
You have to imagine it.
Who said you must keep quiet?
Who heard your story, then rolled their eyes?
Who tried to change your name to Invisible?
You’ve got to imagine.
Who heard your name and refused to pronounce it?
Who checked their watch and said, “Not now”?
James Baldwin wrote, “The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.”
New York – City of invention, roiling town, refresher and renewer.
New York – City of the real, where the canyons whisper in a hundred tongues.
New York – Where your lucky self waits for your arrival, where there is always soil for your roots.
This is our time.
The taste of us, the spice of us, the hollers and the rhythms and the beats of us,
In the echo of our ancestor,s who made certain we know who we are.
City of insistence.
City of resistance.
You have to imagine an army that wins without firing a bullet, a joy that wears down the rock of “no,”
Up from insults
Up from blocked doors
Up from trick bags
Up from fear
Up from shame
Up from the way it was done before.
You have to imagine that space, they said, wasn’t yours.
That time they said you’d never own.
The invisible city lit on its way.
This moment is our proof.
Here’s to imagining a brighter tomorrow.