A dedication to Maya Angelou

With your parting I took another step away from the dawn of my beginnings and the sun that brought me into this world. I walked further away from the blocks that lovingly laid out my path teaching me empathy, humility and kindness; the foundations by which I try to live my life. Today those blocks toppled down again, like a stack of carefully constructed playing cards blown over in the lightest of breezes, just as we did in the days following Her anticipated yet unexpected departure. That fateful day the wind fleetingly changed directions, whisking Her effortlessly away like a bird taken by the current of the wind or the seeds of a dandelion globe launched into the sky when blown. We were left on the ground chasing the dandelion seeds floating up into the sky, as children would grasp at balloons escaping out of arms’ reach, never to be reunited.

It was She who taught me about You, Maya; Your strength, your story, your poetic wisdom. I read and reread your poems to inspire my own in an effort to make sense of the nonsensical. No one told it better than you and this She knew. It was Your words that we recited at the alter that day; not the Lord’s as should be expected. We all celebrated in this small act of defiance.  Like You, we rose, heads held high, refusing to drown in the tears and sadness that hung in the church like raindrops on a humid day right before the storm breaks. I praised Her that day, not him. I gave thanks for Her sacrifice, Her teachings, Her character. I gave thanks for leading me to You. I still do.

You, Maya, taught me the rebellious delight that comes with using words the way we please. Gallivanting away from rules and tradition to celebrate our own individuality, sexuality, and of course our differences. You celebrated your people. I watched you break free from the confines of poetic rules imposed by yet another foreign system of control. I had never seen such power rise up in a one-woman rebellion from a peppered page of prose. You reclaimed your voice through writing, stamping out a space to tell your story, and by doing so you permitted so many to tell theirs. You shamed our people to read in lines -rather than between them- the rawness of a not-too-distance past. You eloquently described the horror of injustice and inequality that did and does occur. We squirmed under the unrelenting light that you pointed on the truths of America’s past, recreated in such vivid detail through your own story. What literary brilliance.

Your written art has kept on inspiring me through my years, as it will in the years to come. And, acknowledging this, if the wind were to bring the vision that passes through my dreams to settle in the present, that illusion, my new dawn would be named Maya. For Maya is the name that represents a story; a story of two phenomenal women, a story of a civilisation of people still rising, and my story of a new beginning.