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Needing courage.....

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Jackie says: Watch a clip of Maya Angelou reading this poem - it's brilliant! She's so inspirational because she has survived so much hardship, pain and abuse - but she's still sassy and powerful and determined to carry on and be who she is. 
Still I rise by Maya Angelou 

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 backyard.

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. 



Expectans Expectavi ( I have waited)

12/3/2021

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John wrote - For me it needed something special, and not so easy to find.  Something to sustain me through three lockdowns, with talks that the new variants on their way may not have the same road map as we have.
That 'find' was Charles Hamilton Sorley's Expectans Expectavi.  Charles was a Scottish poet.  He barely had time to complete his education before being sent to his doom on the battlefields of World War One.  Charles died on the 13th October 1915, aged 20 years old.  Still a boy.   As the Battle of Loos raged around him, a German sniper’s bullet to the head claimed his life.   The poems he wrote are regarded by many literary critics as some of the most important written by the famous war poets.  His name is one of only sixteen inscribed on a stone of slate which sits in Poets Corner, Westminster Abbey, recently opened for Covid-19 vaccinations
The last two stanzas of Expectans Expectavi were set to music in1919 and became an anthem which every chorister in the land knows well.   
​This sanctuary of my soul,
Unwitting I keep white and whole,
Unlatch'd and lit, if thou should'st care
To enter or to tarry there.
​

With parted lips and outstretch'd hands
And list'ning ears Thy servant stands,
Call Thou early, call Thou late,
To Thy great service dedicate.
My soul, keep white, and whole
.
I had always assumed that was it, the finished works.  Nothing could have prepared me, when in lock down, I found it was only half of Charles' posthumously published poem. The person who wrote this poem was young, and he did so in the most extreme circumstances; witnessing carnage and horrors which we could never imagine
​The opening description of this poem is of normal life, which we are all so familiar with, and its innocence.  The first three stanzas are so remote from Charles' daily struggles for survival, as he describes lives which had never seen -  War.  This very simplicity is a counterbalance to the stench of death Charles has as his companion.  This is Charles telling us to grab ''with outstretched hands'' every precious moment of what is ordinary, if our minds are to stay healthy during this lockdown.  
From morn to midnight, all day through,
I laugh and play as others do,
I sin and chatter, just the same
As others with a different name.


And all year long upon the stage
I dance and tumble and do rage
So vehemently, I scarcely see
The inner and eternal me.
​

I have a temple I do not
Visit, a heart I have forgot,
A self that I have never met,
A secret shrine -- and yet, and yet.



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