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MAYA ANGELOU, Love Liberates

Maya Angelou (1928-2014)
Maya Angelou (1928-2014)

Maya Angelou  was an American poet, writer, and civil rights activist. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, and several books of poetry, and was credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows.  She received dozens of awards and more than fifty honorary degrees.

Maya Angelou is best known for her series of seven autobiographies, which focus on her childhood and early adult experiences. The first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) published with the help of James Baldwin, tells of her life up to the age of seventeen. It brought her international recognition and acclaim. (Adapted from Wikipedia)

If you are viewing this post from email, you’ll likely have to click through to the site to view this wise and touching video presentation.

The photograph – Maya Angelou reading On the Pulse of Morning at the Clinton inauguration 1993 – is courtesy of The William J. Clinton Library and is in the public domain. 

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the humble wool of their lives

she charmed them spinning poem out of story
and laughter out of words and deeply religious
their mother put on piety each day for holy Mass

all the while her kitchen crockery stood empty
her dish water whispered of drowning spirits
her coffee was rank with unheard confessions

her pots and pans were hot with delusion
when they walked Stations with her on Good Friday
in their seventeenth year they recognized their lives

as a Calvary of emotional whipping and crosses to bear
the father having washed his hands of them all
while she stayed to pit twin against twin

to cruely play with the humble wool of their lives
with games of schadenfreude and tag-you’re-scapegoat
until they grew too smart for her insane machinations

“One of the oddest things about being grown-up was looking back at something you thought you knew and finding out the truth of it was completely different from what you had always believed.” Patricia Briggs in Bone Crossed

© 2012, poem, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved; Photo credit ~ Vera Kratochvil, Public Domain Pictures.net.

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from the shadow of the moon

file0002109015389like lucid dreaming, like light-infused rain drops  and
the untarnished silver stars above country terrain,
my mother calls to me from the shadow of the moon
my father beams his smile at me from the milky way
gone and gone, still their essence scents my nights

©2013, poem, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved, licensing for online publications is nonnegotiable and requires permission, attribution, link to this site, my copyright, no modification, noncommercial only and does not imply permission to include the work in the site’s printed collections or anthologies.
Photo courtesy of morgueFile