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A Brave and Startling Truth
- by Dr. 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 tells 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
When the curtain falls on the minstrel shows of hate
And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean
When battlefields and coliseums
No longer wake our sons and daughters
Up from the bruised and bloody grass
To lay them in identical plots in foreign soil
When the rapacious storming of the churches
The screaming racket in the temples have ceased
When we come to it
When we let the rifles fall from our shoulder
And our children can dress their dolls in flags of truce
When land mines of death have been removed
And our aged can walk into their evenings of peace
When religious ritual is no longer perfumed
By the incense of burning flesh
And childhood dreams are not kicked awake
By nightmares of sexual abuse
When we come to it
Then we will confess they’re not in the Pyramids
With stones set in mysterious perfection
Nor the Gardens of Babylon
Hanging as eternal beauty
In our collected memory
Not the Grand Canyon
Kindled into delicious colors
By Western sunsets
Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe
Not the sacred peak on Mount Fuji
Stretching to the Rising Sun
Nor Father Amazon or Mother Mississippi who, without favor,
Nurture all creatures on their shores and depths
Those are not only wonders of the world
When we come to it
We, this people, on this miniscule globe
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade, the dagger
Here to 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
Can come songs of such sweetness, exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in its labor
And the body is quieted into awe, awe, 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 back is happy to bow
And the proud neck is glad to bend
Out of such contradiction
We learn we’re neither devils nor divines
When we come to it
This people, on this wavered, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion
A climate wherever 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, we are the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
It looked like the sun wasn’t gonna to shine anymore,
We have somebody, we are somebody
Who can be a rainbow in somebody’s cloud.
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