"The Hill We Climb" begins with a sunrise in the dark. "When day comes," the speaker asks, "[...] where can we find light in this never-ending shade?" This symbolic sunrise is the dawn of a new era for the U.S.—a country, that, as the speaker says, has been going through a particularly painful period of its history. Right from the start, she speaks as one member of a "we," a collective that "carr[ies] loss" together.
"The Hill We Climb" is what's known as an "occasional poem," a poem composed to commemorate a specific event. In this case, that event was the 2021 inauguration of Joe Biden as the President of the United States. With that in mind, the reader can form some pretty specific ideas about what the "never-ending shade" the speaker laments might represent as she goes on:
We've learned that quiet isn't always peace,
and the norms and notions of what "just" is isn't always justice.
These lines gesture to the turbulent period of history leading up to Biden's inauguration. The year before, the U.S. went through not just the global trauma of the coronavirus pandemic, but a reckoning with its racist history: in the wake of George Floyd's murder at the hands of police, the country experienced a massive awakening, and the streets were full of people protesting police brutality against Black Americans. The speaker's pun—"the norms and notions of what 'just' is isn't always justice"—subtly alludes to these protests, and to many citizens' understanding that business as usual means oppression for the country's Black population.
While the speaker is working in free verse here, not using a regular meter or rhyme scheme, she still carefully shapes the sounds of her words. Listen to the rhythm and rhyme in these lines, for example:
And yet, | the dawn | is ours | before | we knew it.
Somehow we | do it.
Here, the speaker moves from a steady, lilting line of iambs (metrical feet that go da-DUM) into a short, sharp line that uses two front-loaded feet: a dactyl (DUM-da-da) and a trochee (DUM-da). The end-stops here mean that each of these lines gets its own little pocket of space. And the matching end rhymes on "knew it" and "do it" connect these rhythmically different lines together. All together, these changing patterns make the speaker's tone feel deliberate and masterful: she's using stress and sound to mirror her ideas.
And here, those ideas come down to one short, solid statement: in spite of all the pain and suffering Americans have endured in recent years, "Somehow [they] do it": they keep going anyway. This mood of grounded, gradual, persistent progress will shape the whole poem.