Trailing Wisps of Glory: Goodbye Ms. Angelou

“I believe each of us comes from the Creator trailing wisps of glory.”

I was very sad to read of Maya Angelou’s passing. I’m not a poet or African American or any kind of woman in the way I think she was, and yet she spoke to me. There are so few people in the world who will tell you the honest truth, and she was one of them. She wrote the truth as she saw it, with all the integrity she had, and yet she was an optimist. It’s there in her maybes, and her pledges to rise, and her defiance of her body’s haste. There are few people in the world I have admired unreservedly, but she is one of them. There are few role models like her – so raw, so compassionate, so dignified.

Not too long ago, I wrote a post on the ERWA blog about writing, and I used her poem ‘Men’ to encourage prose writers to aspire to the kind of precision that poets find in language. Not crafty, or complicated, or esoteric. Just right. Just deep and true. Her similes and metaphors were forged so naturally. In the elegance of great simplicity.

One day they hold you in the
Palms of their hands, gentle, as if you
Were the last raw egg in the world.
(Men)

I loved the vastness of her eye. Prehistoric, cosmic, reaching inward and outward. Even in the details she chose to settle on, there’s a panorama of rich meaning that stretches over the horizon. I remember the poem she read at Clinton’s inauguration.

Each of you a bordered country,
Delicate and strangely made proud,
Yet thrusting perpetually under siege.

Your armed struggles for profit
Have left collars of waste upon
My shore, currents of debris upon my breast.

Yet, today I call you to my riverside,
If you will study war no more. Come,

Clad in peace and I will sing the songs
The Creator gave to me when I and the
Tree and the stone were one.
(from On The Pulse of the Morning)

And Ms. Angelou knew about love. Wrote about love in ways I never will. Yet I can’t even find it in my heart to feel envy – only admiration.

Beloved,
In what other lives or lands
Have I known your lips
Your Hands
Your Laughter brave
Irreverent.
Those sweet excesses that
I do adore.
What surety is there
That we will meet again,
On other worlds some
Future time undated.
I defy my body’s haste.
Without the promise
Of one more sweet encounter
I will not deign to die.
(Refusal)

Of all her poems, my favourite is one of her darker ones. For me, this poem speaks to the sin of disengagement, the waste of cynicism. To me, it’s a commandment to own internally what you experience in the world, but to refuse to allow it to diminish you. It is possible to carry the truth of the world inside you, and yet reject solipsism. It’s important to me, because it’s the hardest challenge she ever laid down and I will spend my life trying to live up to it.

We die,
Welcoming Bluebeards to our darkening closets,
Stranglers to our outstretched necks,
Stranglers, who neither care nor
care to know that
DEATH IS INTERNAL.

We pray,
Savoring sweet the teethed lies,
Bellying the grounds before alien gods,
Gods, who neither know nor
wish to know that
HELL IS INTERNAL.

We love,
Rubbing the nakednesses with gloved hands,
Inverting our mouths in tongued kisses,
Kisses that neither touch nor
care to touch if
LOVE IS INTERNAL.
(The Detached)

If you’ve never read any of her poetry, I hope you will take the opportunity to read some. It’s all over the web. Read it aloud, linger in its rhythm and the roundness of the words. She made language both a sword and a caress.

A great lady, a great poet, a great human being has passed. I’m not religious but I know she was, and she trailed wisps of glory with every line she wrote.