11/24/2023 0 Comments Death peace death maya angelou poems![]() We beckon this good season to wait a while with us. We clap hands and welcome the Peace of Christmas. Security for our beloveds and their beloveds. ![]() But, true Peace.Ī harmony of spirit, a comfort of courtesies. We listen carefully as it gathers strength. Brightening all things,Įven hate which crouches breeding in dark corridors.Īt first it is too soft. It rides on the shoulders of our aged as they walk into their sunsets. Hope is born again in the faces of children ![]() Snow becomes a yielding cushion to aid us Thunder ebbs to silence and lightning sleeps quietly in the corner. The world is encouraged to come away from rancor, Streaming lights of joy, ringing bells of hopeĪnd singing carols of forgiveness high up in the bright air. Into this climate of fear and apprehension, Christmas enters, The sky slips low and grey and threatening.ĭoes the covenant you made with us still hold? Snow falls upon snow, falls upon snow to avalanche Maya AngelouĪnd lightning rattles the eaves of our houses. So whether you are reading this in Advent or in Christmas, go out and create some peace today – for yourself, for your neighbor, for our world.Īmazing Peace: A Christmas Poem by Dr. I can find peace for a moment or an hour somehow, somewhere. This is the glad and hopeful season as Maya Angelou says. Yet for each of peace is attainable every day. In some ways peace is an ideal, a seemingly unattainable goal, at least in the world as a whole. For they existed.Today’s Christmas poem which Maya Angelou first read at the 2005 White House tree-lighting ceremony, makes me very aware of how much we lack peace in our world. However, that part has not left us high and dry, but left an impact on us: we can “be and be better. And we reach true maturity when we are able to admit that we have lost a part of ourselves. “Our senses” are “restored, never to be the same.” We do return to normalcy, even if it’s a different feeling than what we’re used to. It’s simply a profound feeling of isolation.īut as sorrowful as her previous metaphors are, her final stanza offers hope, and lets us know that it is okay that our loved ones have died:Īfter enough time passes, “peace blooms” out of the dirt comes the beautiful blossom of acceptance, even if it is “slowly and always irregularly.” Eventually, “spaces fill”: the feelings of emptiness go away. We don’t go crazy, or “maddened,” by loss, but rather we feel alone, as if in “dark, cold caves,” and unable to speak, unable to move. Angelou explains, “We are not so much maddened/as reduced to the unutterable ignorance/of dark, cold/caves” (36-39). The “radiance” of the people we love “form” our minds because they are such a big part of our lives, and that is why it is so dramatic for us, as in, our minds “fall away,” when our family and friends depart. She elaborates, “Our minds, formed/and informed by their/radiance,/fall away” (32-25). All feeling of what life, or “our reality,” is, feels “bound to them,” the people that have gone and so when they are no longer with us, we lose our sense of what is real and what isn’t. In the following stanza, Angelou states, “Great souls die and/our reality, bound to/them, takes leave of us” (25-27). “Kind words” are left “unsaid,” and “walks,” though “promised,” can never be taken. And I love the concept of the memory “gnaw,” because it perfectly describes the miserable feeling of regret that follows, and of knowing that the events in our memories can never quite be repeated. Our memories are “sharpened” because all we have left of our loved one is the past. Next, the poet writes, “Our memory, suddenly sharpened,/examines,/gnaws on kind words/unsaid,/promised walks/never taken” (19-24). In these moments (“briefly”), we become highly attuned to our feelings and surroundings as we realize the weight of what has happened. She goes on, “Our eyes, briefly,/see with a hurtful clarity” (16-18). The air becomes “rare” because we feel that the wind has been knocked out of us the atmosphere seems to change entirely. These lines describe the first moments of shock that come when hearing of a death. But then she continues into what occurs when people, or “great souls,” (12) die: “When great souls die/the air around us becomes/light, rare, sterile” (12-14). In fact, her quote is even appropriate to the poem’s message.Īngelou opens the poem by discussing how even trees falling affects everything and everyone around them. One of these was by Maya Angelou, and it is in honor of her that I’ve chosen “When Great Trees Fall” for this week’s installment. As a lover of literature, I was delighted by all the quotes by famous authors that are engraved in the ground. This past Saturday, a friend and I went to check out Jack Kerouac Alley and City Lights Bookstore in the North Beach area of San Francisco.
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