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A Brave and Startling Truth
Maya Angelou
American Author, Poet and Shero
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 and 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.
This
poem was written and delivered in honor
of the 50th anniversary of the United Nations.
(c) Maya Angelou, from
'A Brave And Startling Truth'
Published by Random House
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