What if?

What if our world’s leaders, innovators and thinkers

didn’t speak about change in monologues?

What if we spoke and hoped through dialogue?

While dialogue is not the chorus speaking perfectly as one

dialogue is that daring cacophony.

The diverse call to action. It is complex and sometimes chaotic conversation

this courageous confrontation it is the collective compassion for the common good.

It is meeting with meaning, participation with purpose, speech in service of others here by dialogue.

We do not mean it in the abstract. We mean it’s in the act.

It is a verb in every sense of the word.

It is participating, communicating, activating because we know something has to be done.

And fast. And though it might take years change is worth a lifetime. Push. By pull back. By fourth. We might not get the correct answers but we get closer to asking the right questions.

What if our world’s leaders, businesses, innovators, thinkers gathered together.

What if we could look in each other’s eyes not for press or publicity but for progress.

Then we the assembled would act with these words at our prow.

If past is written in prologue our progress will be spoken in dialogue as verb, vocation. a vow.

To not only ask what if? but also.

What now?

[Amanda Gorman, Inaugural and Super Bowl Poet]