A Prayer Inspired By ‘Still I Rise’ By Maya Angelou

(A poem loosely inspired by or based on the poem of resistance and empowerment titled ‘Still I Rise’ penned by Maya Angelou, which I intend to share with fellow poets, humanists, and with all my women comrades in the month of March, the phenomenal #WomensHistoryMonth)

Let’s talk about a prayer of a clear, azure sky
After explosives have burnt
and exhausted themselves in the streets.

Let’s read ‘Still I Rise’, the fiery utterances
Of a burnt out poet after our darkest dreams
With their dead limbs and hands, return to their shivering abyss.

Let’s adopt, steal, borrow the unwritten manuscripts
Of our violated kith and kin, and eulogize them,
Let the countercurrent of our scribbled verses
Settle in our skins, boiling like ‘resistance’.

Let’s rain like adamant cloudburst,
Descending on flooded rivers on a high tide night.

With the deep, dark rain poems we bleed,
The muddy river bank finds solace in chaos.

Hope encircles the nakedness, growing
Like an undying flame as pyres burn,
Dark graves are laid to rest.

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Let’s warm the pulse of hope
even as our embers die out,
Surreptitiously, unannounced.

Image source: pixabay

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