A Brave and Startling Truth

I am a relative newbie to poetry. For some reason or another, I hadn’t been called into its mystical realm till relatively recently. Maybe it’s divine timing, that it came into my orbit when I needed it the most. As of lately, I have been trying to find one new poem to read every day. Throughout this pandemic, against the backdrop of all the noise, the heightened fear, the uncertainty, the violence, the flagrant hastiness of the internet, these poems have become a salve for these wild times. I read them out loud to myself, like a spell, I relish the slowness of the syllables dripping off my lips in this fast cruel world I can’t or don’t want to keep up with. More than ever, I appreciate poetry’s expression of truth, its elegiac intentionality and the meaning they give to things that often feel so hard to explain. I feel like reading poetry out loud, to myself, humbles me and makes me not just a better listener but a better human. As if every carefully chosen word helps me develop a different kind of sentience, as if each new stanza opens me up more to the world in a new way.

The poems that hit me the hardest are the ones that really try to get to the crux of the complexity of being alive. This last week especially, with so much pain and suffering in the air, with so many difficult realities and conflicting dualities to hold at the same time, this poem by Maya Angelou which she wrote for the 50th Anniversary of the formation of the United Nations, does just that. I read it and it broke me. With my heart feeling so heavy and my brain is feeling so tired, I’ve been struggling to write anything but I felt the deep need to share this. I am so very grateful for this poem, for Maya, for helping us try to make sense of the contradictory cataclysms of life here on this very earth.

A BRAVE AND STARTLING TRUTH by Maya Angelou

We, this people, on a small and lonely planet

Traveling through casual space

Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns

To a destination where all signs tell us

It is possible and imperative that we learn

A brave and startling truth

And when we come to it

To the day of peacemaking

When we release our fingers

From fists of hostility

And allow the pure air to cool our palms

When we come to it

When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate

And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean

When battlefields and coliseum

No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters

Up with the bruised and bloody grass

To lie in identical plots in foreign soil

When the rapacious storming of the churches

The screaming racket in the temples have ceased

When the pennants are waving gaily

When the banners of the world tremble

Stoutly in the good, clean breeze

When we come to it

When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders

And children dress their dolls in flags of truce

When land mines of death have been removed

And the aged can walk into evenings of peace

When religious ritual is not perfumed

By the incense of burning flesh

And childhood dreams are not kicked awake

By nightmares of abuse

When we come to it

Then we will confess that not the Pyramids

With their stones set in mysterious perfection

Nor the Gardens of Babylon

Hanging as eternal beauty

In our collective memory

Not the Grand Canyon

Kindled into delicious color

By Western sunsets

Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe

Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji

Stretching to the Rising Sun

Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,

Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores

These are not the only wonders of the world

When we come to it

We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe

Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger

Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace

We, this people on this mote of matter

In whose mouths abide cankerous words

Which challenge our very existence

Yet out of those same mouths

Come songs of such exquisite sweetness

That the heart falters in its labor

And the body is quieted into awe

We, this people, on this small and drifting planet

Whose hands can strike with such abandon

That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living

Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness

That the haughty neck is happy to bow

And the proud back is glad to bend

Out of such chaos, of such contradiction

We learn that we are neither devils nor divines

When we come to it

We, this people, on this wayward, floating body

Created on this earth, of this earth

Have the power to fashion for this earth

A climate where every man and every woman

Can live freely without sanctimonious piety

Without crippling fear

When we come to it

We must confess that we are the possible

We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world

That is when, and only when

We come to it.

Here is a clip of Maya Reading “A Brave and Startling Truth” at the UN's 50th Anniversary, in 1995. 

In love, care and tenderness,

Naomi xxx