Julia Roberts Pays Emotional Tribute to Renee Nicole Goode at NYC Rise Up Concert APT

I don't know about you guys, but my heart is beating really fast right now, and I would just like to take a moment together. Let's all just put our phones down for just a second. You can pick them back up in a minute. They will survive without you, but do this for me. Just put your hand on your beating heart and just close your eyes and just take a really deep breath in and breathe in all that hope, all that love, and just breathe out all that fear. Just let it all go, and that is the power that we all have together. So just keep doing that, because that's a critical piece to this puzzle, and it's a critical piece to continuing the fight that exhausts all of us. We all feel like I can't turn the news on. I don't want to hear it, but we have to hear it. We have to face it, but if we keep inhaling and exhaling, we will prevail. This I know for sure, and I know backstage they're thinking, okay, she wasn't supposed to say any of that, so now I'm gonna get to business, to the beautiful business that I'm here for, which is to talk about Renee Nicole Goode. Renee Nicole Goode is not a symbol. She is an American woman, a queer woman, who is doing the very best she could do to be good in an unjust world. Yeah, and I am honored to celebrate her life and her legacy tonight, because the life she gave is our responsibility to carry, and I am so grateful and honored to the poet Amanda Gorman for writing these beautiful words that I am allowed to share with you now, and it is with her blessing that I do so. This poem is entitled for Renee Nicole Goode. They say she is no more, that her absence roars, blood-blown like a rose, iced-wheelsed, flinched, and froze. Now bear riot of candles, dark fury of flowers, pure howling of hymns, if for us she arose somewhere in the pitched deep of our grief, crouches our power, the howl where we begin straining upon the edge of the crooked crater of the worst of what we've been. Change is only possible and all the greater when the labor and bitter anger of our neighbors is moved by the love and better angels of our nature. What they call death and void we know is breath and voice. In the end, gorgeously endures our enormity. You could believe departed to be the dawn when the blank night has so long stood, but our bright-fled angels will never be fully gone.