The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou (3 page)

In a time of furtive sighs
Sweet hellos and sad goodbyes
Half-truths told and entire lies
My conscience echoes thunder.

In a time when kingdoms come
Joy is brief as summer's fun
Happiness its race has run
Then pain stalks in to plunder.

Tears
The crystal rags
Viscous tatters
of a worn-through soul.

Moans
Deep swan song
Blue farewell
of a dying dream.

We die,
Welcoming Bluebeards to our darkening closets,
Stranglers to our outstretched necks,
Stranglers, who neither care nor
care to know that
DEATH IS INTERNAL.

We pray,
Savoring sweet the teethed lies,
Bellying the grounds before alien gods,
Gods, who neither know nor
wish to know that
HELL IS INTERNAL.

We love,
Rubbing the nakednesses with gloved hands,
Inverting our mouths in tongued kisses,
Kisses that neither touch nor
care to touch if
LOVE IS INTERNAL.

Your voice at times a fist
Tight in your throat
Jabs ceaselessly at phantoms
In the room,
Your hand a carved and
Skimming boat
Goes down the Nile
To point out Pharaoh's tomb.

You're Africa to me
At brightest dawn.
The Congo's green and
Copper's brackish hue,
A continent to build
With Black Man's brawn.
I sit at home and see it all
Through you.

Tonight
 when you spread your pallet
of magic,
 I escaped.
Sitting apart,
 I saw you grim and unkempt.
Your vulgarness
 not of living,
your demands
 not from need.

Tonight
 as you sprinkled your brain-dust
of rainbows,
 I had no eyes.
Seeing all
I saw the colors fade
and change.
 The blood, red dulled
through the dyes,
and the naked
Black-White truth.

I sit a throne upon the times
when Kings are rare and
Consorts
slide into the grease of scullery maids.

So gaily wave a crown of light
(astride the royal chair) that blinds
the commoners who genuflect and cross their fingers.

The years will lie beside me
on the queenly bed.
And coupled we'll await
the ages’ dust to cake my lids again.

And when the rousing kiss is given,
why must it always be a fairy, and
only just a Prince?

No sound falls
from the moaning sky
No scowl wrinkles
the evening pool
 The stars lean down
 A stony brilliance
 While birds fly.

The market leers
its empty shelves
Streets bare bosoms
to scanty cars
 This bed yawns
 beneath the weight
 of our absent selves.

She came home running
 back to the mothering blackness
 deep in the smothering blackness
white tears icicle gold plains of her face
 She came home running

She came down creeping
 here to the black arms waiting
 now to the warm heart waiting
rime of alien dreams befrosts her rich brown face
 She came down creeping

She came home blameless
 black yet as Hagar's daughter
 tall as was Sheba's daughter
threats of northern winds die on the desert's face
 She came home blameless

When love is a shimmering curtain
Before a door of chance
That leads to a world in question
Wherein the macabrous dance
Of bones that rattle in silence
Of blinded eyes and rolls
Of thick lips thin, denying
A thousand powdered moles,
Where touch to touch is feel
And life a weary whore
 I would be carried off, not gently
 To a shore,
 Where love is the scream of anguish
 And no curtain drapes the door.

If today I follow death,
go down its trackless wastes,
salt my tongue on hardened tears
for my precious dear time's waste
race
along that promised cave in a headlong
deadlong
haste,
Will you
have
the
grace
to mourn for
me?