Maya Angelou’s memorial service update

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A member of Mount Zion Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, NC, for more than 30 years late poet Maya Angelou will be remembered there during a memorial service on Thursday night, June 5, 2014. The service will be held at 7:30 p.m. It is located at 950 File Street. The service is open to the public. Funeral information is still pending.

Here’s the last poem in Angelou’s fifth volume of poetry, I Shall Not Be Moved.


“When Great Trees Fall”

When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.


When great trees fall
in 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.”

― Maya Angelou

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