- April is National Poetry Month
- Join the Vorhoff Library as we celebrate a woman poet each day during the month!
- Maya Angelou
- Posted April 5, 2009
Maya Angelou is perhaps most famous for her autobiographical novel I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which you may have had to read in high school. However, Angelou is a versatile artist who is also an accomplished poet. She was born in small-town Arkansas in 1928, and much of her poetry speaks to the southern black female experience of her era, and "what it means to be black and a woman". However, she is by no means a parochial poet, and also writes about common poetic themes such as love and the small beauty of everyday life.
At the Vorhoff library, we have The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou, although since it was published in 1994, you may have to look elsewhere for anything she's written in the past 15 years. We also have 1971's Pulitzer-Prize-nominated Just Give Me A Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie, and Amazing Peace, a Christmas poem written for the 2005 lighting of the National Christmas Tree.
Poem of the Day:
Still I Rise
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.
Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.
Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.
Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?
Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don't you take it awful hard
'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines
Diggin' in my own backyard.
You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I'll rise.
Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?
Out of the huts of history's shame
I rise
Up from a past that's rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.
