remembering maya angelou

for a midwest-bred and Harlem-rehomed woman who read and day-drank and hoped and prayed and wrote her way to freedom in a wide open world, who refused to speak for six years and declared about it "there is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you":

i know
as you knew
how a clipped wing
could sing
a dirge for dead

dreams
let freedom ring.

sister bird
with bosom sore
you're caged no more
your struggle's done
but you'll sing on
that holy trill
hope's ghostly chill

the sky,

at last,

your home.

sister bird
Love has come
through wasted fears
in desert years

Love's come through

for us.


in grateful hotdiggety memory of Maya Angelou, whose wings surely fit her well.
with hope that she now sings to the Lord a new song.

---

there's a darkness upon you that's flooded in light . . . it flies by day and it flies by night and I'm frightened by those that don't see it there was a dream and one day I could see it like a bird in a cage I broke in and demanded that somebody free it // The Avett Brothers