the Infamous Scribblers

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops.
Weakened by my soulful cries.

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don't you take it awful hard
'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines
Diggin' in my own back yard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I'll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history's shame
I rise
Up from a past that's rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise

I rise
I rise.

SOURCE: http://www.math.buffalo.edu/~sww/angelou/poems-ma.html#phen

Labels: Maya Angelou, poetry

Posted by illaine at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments

Pleasure turns to the pain
Lessons learned from the strain
Questions burned in my brain..
About whether love is humane in its touch.

These thoughts are like salmon swimming upstream
In the tears of your deceit.
Fighting the current hurt that kills more than is created by the chaos
of our intertwined emotions.

Chaotic because the anchor of Eros' arrow has been plucked
from the vessel of my undying infatuation
Separation not as simple as the distance between us
My mind no longer possessed by demons that have been the overseers of my enslavement to your lies

The seeds of these lies rooted so deeply
They have cracked the foundation of what we once shared
Allowing the faith in us I had sealed inside to gush out like a river
ripping the image of our future together from my thoughts
as violently and as brutally as if it were a child
being taken from its mothers arms

I'm left surrounded in darkness
but i refuse to be swallowed by it
my loneliness like the night air
invisible to the eye, obvious to the touch,it is cold uncomfortableness

Yet if i could do it all over again
I'd do it in the same skin I'm in
To lay down and let love die
just stay down and let love lie?
no, no..not I

I'd stay around and let love fly
Even though i have seen its darkest form-deceit
Nothing else could taste this warm or feel this sweet...

Labels: love, poetry

Posted by illaine at 9:55 AM | Permalink | Comments