“A Brave and Startling Truth” by Maya Angelou

We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth

And when we come to it
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms

When we come to it
When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate
And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean
When battlefields and coliseum
No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil

When the rapacious storming of the churches
The screaming racket in the temples have ceased
When the pennants are waving gaily
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze

When we come to it
When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders
And children dress their dolls in flags of truce
When land mines of death have been removed
And the aged can walk into evenings of peace
When religious ritual is not perfumed
By the incense of burning flesh
And childhood dreams are not kicked awake
By nightmares of abuse

When we come to it
Then we will confess that not the Pyramids
With their stones set in mysterious perfection
Nor the Gardens of Babylon
Hanging as eternal beauty
In our collective memory
Not the Grand Canyon
Kindled into delicious color
By Western sunsets

Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe
Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji
Stretching to the Rising Sun
Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,
Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores
These are not the only wonders of the world

When we come to it
We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace
We, this people on this mote of matter
In whose mouths abide cankerous words
Which challenge our very existence
Yet out of those same mouths
Come songs of such exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in its labor
And the body is quieted into awe

We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines

When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear

When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.

-Maya Angelou

A Fierce Feminine Poem for Our Time

I come to the end of this poem, mouth agape in awe. “Wow,” I whisper. Then, “Yes.”

Of Horror and Possibility

In mystical terms, we could say that Maya Angelou is expressing the Fierce Feminine in this poem. She is speaking the truth. Sometimes, the truth is unbearable. So much so, that entire cultures and civilizations forbid its telling, whether by law or by implication.

In this poem, Angelou cuts through all pretense and delivers the shattering truth about humanity’s actions and where they have led. She does not shy away from the horrors that we have created.

Yet, she also invites us to a vision of our possibility. This vision is breathtaking in its magnificence. It is so far beyond what most of us imagine is possible for the human race.

Her love for humanity, and for what is possible, is expressed in those lines:

When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world

And so, Angelou reflects the love of the fierce forms of the Divine Mother. She speaks the terrible truth, and yet from it, emerges the most glorious possibility. She does not shy away from the horror of humanity, and yet she fundamentally loves and believe in humanity.

The Fierce Feminine and Our Global Crisis

The Fierce Feminine form of the Divine Mother has been known variously as Kali, the Black Madonna, Lilith, and by countless other names.

In his book, “The Mother,” Sri Aurobindo describes “Mahakali,” the form of the Fierce Feminine in Hindu tradition.

For she too is the Mother and her love is as intense as her wrath and she has a deep and passionate kindness. When she is allowed to intervene in her strength, then in one moment are broken like things without consistence the obstacles that immobilise or the enemies that assail the seeker.

If her anger is dreadful to the hostile and the vehemence of her pressure painful to the weak and timid, she is loved and worshipped by the great, the strong and the noble; for they feel that her blows beat what is rebellious in their material into strength and perfect truth, hammer straight what is wry and perverse and expel what is impure or defective.

But for her what is done in a day might have taken centuries; without her Ananda might be wide and grave or soft and sweet and beautiful but would lose the flaming joy of its most absolute intensities. To knowledge she gives a conquering might, brings to beauty and harmony a high and mounting movement and imparts to the slow and difficult labour after perfection an impetus that multiplies the power and shortens the long way.

Nothing can satisfy her that falls short of the supreme ecstasies, the highest heights, the noblest aims, the largest vistas. Therefore with her is the victorious force of the Divine and it is by grace of her fire and passion and speed if the great achievement can be done now than hereafter.

Sri Aurobindo, in “The Mother“

We are living in a time dominated by the Fierce Feminine – what the Hindu mystics have called “Kali Yuga.” It is an era, they have said, not only of immense destruction, but also of immense possibility.

Carolyn Baker, Author of “Collapsing Consciously,” offers her own Fierce Feminine insight into our time:

“The innumerable losses of industrial civilization’s collapse will, over time, bring forth a new story and a new relationship with people, resources, things, and the earth. It will necessitate living as if our very breath is a gift and every person in our lives is an opportunity to pass on the gifts we have received. The death of the old paradigm and all of the trappings of industrial civilization will provide space to forge new values, new relationships, and minimize, if not completely obliterate, the concept of debt from human consciousness.”

Carolyn Baker, Collapsing Consciously: Transformative Truths for Turbulent Times

A Poem for Our Times

Our world is in a state of crisis. Environmental catastrophe has progressed to the point that the very existence of human life on earth is at risk.

What is needed now is not an incremental approach to reform. We have strayed so far from our origins as people living in deep harmony with the rhythms of life that we must undergo a radical transformation.

What we each need, and what we collectively need, is a perspective akin to Maya Angelou’s perspective in this poem. To look with naked honesty at the terrible reality of the world and what the human race has created. And yet, simultaneously, to respond with an equally exalted vision of what is possible for humanity. And then to give our lives fully to that vision by becoming it.

As Gandhi said, “We must be the change we wish to see in the world.” This is not merely a popular platitude. It is very practical advice.

Andrew Harvey echoes the perspective of Angelou and Baker when he describes “the most important instruction [he] knows” for our time as this: marrying “the wisdom of the serpent and the innocence of the dove.”

The innocence of the dove is the joy, hope and radiant vision given to those who open to the mystical path and especially to those who understand the great and saving truth that evolutionary mystics such as Sri Aurobindo, Bede Griffiths and Jesus himself have revealed to us: That the greatest light is born out of the deepest darkness and that humanity is destined to be transfigured into an embodied divine humanity through a period of an almost unimaginably difficult ordeal.

The wisdom of the serpent is the radical and illusion-less knowledge of everything in us that does not want this birth, that fights secretly and bitterly against it and that is addicted to and seduced by the dark forces that are also part of the mystery’s alchemical working.

If you only have the innocence of the dove, you will be like a lamb led to slaughter in a world of addicted and dangerous people. If you only have the wisdom of the serpent, you will often be tempted by despair, paralysis, exhausting rage, denial of possibility and even the kind of nihilism and lethal fantasy we all now see exploding around us.

If you pray for the grace, however, to fuse these seeming opposites in your depths together, what will be given to you is a wholly new level of embodied divine consciousness which will enable you to stay inspired and steady and luminous with realistic hope and focus committed to doing whatever you can for the triumph of justice and compassion in whatever circumstances may arise, however bizarre or terrifying.

Andrew Harvey, “Praying Our Way Forward Through the Dance of Opposites“

We can look to Maya Angelou’s poem, “A Brave and Startling Truth,” to see those opposites fused in one mind and heart. May we all go forth with such radical honesty, and such courageous hope.