photo: oprah.com
Seek no haven in my shadow,
I will give you no hiding place down here.
Don’t tell me poetry and the NBA have nothing in common. In both cases, what happens in the second half of the fourth quarter means everything. Maya Angelou recited her new poem “On the Pulse of Morning” at the 1993 inauguration of fellow Arkansas traveler Bill Clinton and you loved her voice, but didn’t really know where she was going. But the poet who gave articulation to pain in 1969’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” closed strong with those last two lines. “Nailed it” in the monotonous vernacular of the day.
Leave your mark, she was saying. That’s the only responsibility that comes with being born.
Dr. Maya Angelou passed away today at age 86 in Winston-Salem, NC, where she’s lived for years. Read some of the epic remembrances out there for more on the mark she has left.
And listen to this track Ruthie Foster recorded, setting the words of Angelou’s “Phenomenal Woman” poem to music in 2007.
Foster first heard the arrangement by Canadian songwriter Amy Sky at a festival. “We were in the studio and Ruthie sat down at the Wurlitzer and started playing that song and I said ‘What is THAT’”? said producer Malcolm “Papa Mali” Welbourne. They were assembling material from bits and pieces for the Phenomenal Ruthie Foster album. “I said ‘that could be the centerpiece of the album.”
Maya Angelou heard the recording, Foster says, and was thrilled with the result. “The last time I came through her neck of the words (North Carolina), she sent flowers to me backstage. It meant so much to me.”
Foster’s three-year-old daughter Maya is named after the great writer of this song, which describes the essence of Maya Angelou in her own words:
Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I’m not cute or built to suit or fashion-model size.
When I start to tell them,
They think I’m tellin’ lies.
I say, “It’s in the reach of my arms,
The span of my hips,
The stride to my steps,
The curl of my lips.”
CHORUS:
I’m a woman – Phenomenal woman.
I’m a woman. Baby, that’s me.
I walk into a room Just as cool as you please
And to a man they will stand
And fall down on their knees.
When they swarm around me
Like a hive of honey bees,
I say, “It’s in the fire in my eyes,
The flash of my teeth,
The swing of my waist,
The joy in my feet.”
Now you understand Just why my head’s not bowed.
I don’t shout or jump about Or have to talk real loud.
When you see me passin’, It oughta make you proud.
I say, “It’s in click of my heels, The bend of my hair,
The palm of my hand, The need for my care.”
‘Cause I’m a woman – Phenomenal woman.
I’m a woman. Baby, that’s me.