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When Great Trees Fall
by Maya Angelou

*Thanks, Megan, for posting this on your blog. Hope you don't mind me swiping it and using it here!*

When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker downin tall grasses
,and even elephantslumber after safety.


When great trees fallin forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly, see with
a hurtful clarity.

Our memory,
suddenly sharpened,
examines, gnaws on kind words
unsaid,promised walks
never taken.

Great souls die and
our reality, bound to them,
takes leave of us.
Our souls,dependent upon their nurture,
now shrink, wizened.

Our minds,
formed and informed by their radiance,
fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance
of dark, cold caves.

And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always irregularly.
Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored,
never to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be better.
For they existed.

1 comment:

  1. love that poem so much!
    (and i swiped it from someone else who swiped it from someone else... let the swiping continue.)

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