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The Poet: Maya Angelou, “A Brave and Startling Truth”

Saturday, May 19, 2018 3:17

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“A Brave and Startling Truth”

“We, this people, on a small and lonely planet

Traveling through casual space,

Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns,

To a destination where all signs tell us

It is possible and imperative that we learn

A brave and startling truth.

And when we come to it,

To the day of peacemaking,

When we release our fingers

From fists of hostility

And allow the pure air to cool our palms,

When we come to it,

When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate,

And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean,

When battlefields and coliseum

No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters

Up with the bruised and bloody grass

To lie in identical plots in foreign soil.

When the rapacious storming of the churches,

The screaming racket in the temples have ceased,

When the pennants are waving gaily,

When the banners of the world tremble

Stoutly in the good, clean breeze…

When we come to it,

When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders,

And children dress their dolls in flags of truce,

When land mines of death have been removed

And the aged can walk into evenings of peace,

When religious ritual is not perfumed

By the incense of burning flesh,

And childhood dreams are not kicked awake

By nightmares of abuse…

When we come to it,

Then we will confess that not the Pyramids

With their stones set in mysterious perfection,

Nor the Gardens of Babylon

Hanging as eternal beauty

In our collective memory,

Not the Grand Canyon

Kindled into delicious color

By Western sunsets

Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe,

Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji

Stretching to the Rising Sun.

Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,

Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores

These are not the only wonders of the world.

When we come to it,

We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe,

Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger,

Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace…

We, this people on this mote of matter,

In whose mouths abide cankerous words

Which challenge our very existence,

Yet out of those same mouths

Come songs of such exquisite sweetness

That the heart falters in its labor,

And the body is quieted into awe.

We, this people, on this small and drifting planet,

Whose hands can strike with such abandon

That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living.

Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness

That the haughty neck is happy to bow,

And the proud back is glad to bend.

Out of such chaos, of such contradiction

We learn that we are neither devils nor divines.

When we come to it,

We, this people, on this wayward, floating body,

Created on this earth, of this earth,

Have the power to fashion for this earth

A climate where every man and every woman

Can live freely without sanctimonious piety,

Without crippling fear.

When we come to it,

We must confess that we are the possible,

We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world

That is when, and only when

We come to it.”

- Maya Angelou

Source: http://coyoteprime-runningcauseicantfly.blogspot.com/2018/05/the-poet-maya-angelou-brave-and.html

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