Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'Fore I Diiie
Copyright © 1971 by Maya Angelou
All rights reserved under International
and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States by
Random House, Inc., New York,
and simultaneously in Canada
by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
The following poems were first published in
The Poetry of Maya Angelou and are reprinted
by permission of Hirt Music Inc.
Copyright © 1969 by Hirt Music Inc.:
“They Went Home,” “The Gamut,”
“To a Man,” “No Loser, No Weeper,”
“When You Come to Me, “Remembering,”
“In a Time,” “Tears,” “The Detached,”
“To a Husband,” “Accident,” “Let’s
Majeste” or the “Ego and I,”
“On Diverse Deviations,” “Mourning Grace,”
“Sounds Like Pearls,” “When I Think
About Myself,” “Letter to an Aspiring
Junkie,” “Miss Scarlett, Mr. Rhett & Other
Latter-Day Saints,” “Faces,” “To a Freedom
Fighter,” “Riot: 60’s,” “No No No No,”
“Black Ode,” “My Guilt,” “The Calling of
Names,” “On Working White Liberals,”
“Sepia Fashion Show,” “The Thirteens
(Black),” “The Thirteens (White),”
“Harlem Hopscotch.”
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 70-156964
eISBN: 978-0-307-83327-3
Random House Website address:
http://www.randomhouse.com/
v3.1
To AMBER SAM
and the ZORRO MAN
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
PART ONE
Where Love Is a Scream of Anguish They Went Home
The Gamut
A Zorro Man
To a Man
Late October
No Loser, No Weeper
When You Come to Me
Remembering
In a Time
Tears
The Detached
To a Husband
Accident
Let’s Majeste
After
The Mothering Blackness
On Diverse Deviations
Mourning Grace
How I Can Lie to You
Sounds Like Pearls
PART TWO
Just Before the World Ends When I Think About Myself
On a Bright Day, Next Week
Letter to an Aspiring Junkie
Miss Scarlett, Mr. Rhett and Other Latter-Day Saints
Times-Square-Shoeshine-Composition
Faces
To a Freedom Fighter
Riot: 60’s
We Saw Beyond Our Seeming
Black Ode
No No No No
My Guilt
The Calling of Names
On Working White Liberals
Sepia Fashion Show
The Thirteens (Black)
The Thirteens (White)
Harlem Hopscotch
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
PART ONE
Where Love Is a Scream of Anguish
They Went Home
They went home and told their wives,
that never once in all their lives,
had they known a girl like me,
But … They went home.
They said my house was licking clean,
no word I spoke was ever mean,
I had an air of mystery,
But … They went home.
My praises were on all men’s lips,
they liked my smile, my wit, my hips,
they’d spend one night, or two or three.
But …
The Gamut
Soft you day, be velvet soft,
My true love approaches,
Look you bright, you dusty sun,
Array your golden coaches.
Soft you wind, be soft as silk
My true love is speaking.
Hold you birds, your silver throats,
His golden voice I’m seeking.
Come you death, in haste, do come
My shroud of black be weaving,
Quiet my heart, be deathly quiet,
My true love is leaving.
A Zorro Man
Here
in the wombed room
silk purple drapes
flash a light as subtle
as your hands before
love-making
Here
in the covered lens
I catch a
clitoral image of
your general inhabitation
long and like a
late dawn in winter
Here
this clean mirror
traps me unwilling
in a gone time
when I was love
and you were booted and brave
and trembling for me.
To a Man
My man is
Black Golden Amber
Changing.
Warm mouths of Brandy Fine
Cautious sunlight on a patterned rug
Coughing laughter, rocked on a whorl of French tobacco
Graceful turns on woolen stilts
Secretive?
A cat’s eye.
Southern. Plump and tender with navy bean sullenness
And did I say “Tender”?
The gentleness
A big cat stalks through stubborn bush
And did I mention “Amber”?
The heatless fire consuming itself.
Again. Anew. Into ever neverlessness.
My man is Amber
Changing
Always into itself
New. Now New.
Still itself.
Still.
Late October
Carefully
the leaves of autumn
sprinkle down the tinny
sound of little dyings
and skies sated
of ruddy sunsets
of roseate dawns
roil ceaselessly in
cobweb greys and turn
to black
for comfort.
Only lovers
see the fall
a signal end to endings
a gruffish gesture alerting
those who will not be alarmed
that we begin to stop
in order simply
to begin
again.
No Loser, No Weeper
“I hate to lose something,”
then she bent her head
“even a dime, I wish I was dead.
I can’t explain it. No more to be said.
Cept I hate to lose something.”
“I lost a doll once and cried for a week.
She could open her eyes, and do all but speak.
I believe she was took, by some doll-snatching-sneak
I tell you, I hate to lose something.”
“A watch of mine once, got up and walked away.
It had twelve numbers on it and for the time of day.
I’ll never forget it and all I can say
Is I really hate to lose something.”
“Now if I felt that way bout a watch and a toy,
What you think I feel bout my lover-boy?
I ain’t threatening you madam, but he is my evening’s joy.
And I mean I really hate to lose something.”
When You Come to Me
When you come to me, unbidden,
Beckoning me
To long-ago rooms,
Where memories lie.
Offering me, as to a child, an attic,
Gatherings of days too few.
Baubles of stolen kisses.
Trinkets of borrowed loves.
Trunks of secret words,
I CRY.
Remembering
Soft grey ghosts crawl up my sleeve
to peer into my eyes
while I within deny their threats
and answer them with lies.
Mushlike memories perform
a ritual on my lips
I lie in stolid hopelessness
and they lay my soul in strips.
In a Time
In a time of secret wooing
Today prepares tomorrow’s ruin
Left knows not what right is doing
My heart is torn asunder.
In a time of furtive sighs
Sweet hellos and sad goodbyes
Half-truths told and entire lies
My conscience echoes thunder
In a time when kingdoms come
Joy is brief as summer’s fun
Happiness, its race has run
Then pain stalks in to plunder.
Tears
Tears
The crystal rags
Viscous tatters
of a worn-through soul
Moans
Deep swan song
Blue farewell
of a dying dream.
The Detached
We die,
Welcoming Bluebeards to our darkening closets,
Stranglers to our outstretched necks.
Stranglers, who neither care nor
care to know that
DEATH IS INTERNAL.
We pray,
Savoring sweet the teethed lies,
Bellying the grounds before alien gods
Gods, who neither know nor
wish to know that
HELL IS INTERNAL.
We love,
Rubbing the nakednesses with gloved hands
Inverting our mouths in tongued kisses,
Kisses that neither touch nor
care to touch if
LOVE IS INTERNAL.
To a Husband
Your voice at times a fist
Tight in your throat
Jabs ceaselessly at phantoms
In the room,
Your hand a carved and
skimming boat
Goes down the Nile
To point out Pharoah’s tomb.
You’re Africa to me
At brightest dawn.
The Congo’s green and
Copper’s brackish hue,
A continent to build
With Black Man’s brawn.
I sit at home and see it all
Through you.
Accident
tonight
when you spread your pallet
of magic,
I escaped.
sitting apart,
I saw you grim and unkempt.
Your vulgar-ness
not of living
your demands
not from need.
tonight
as you sprinkled your brain-dust
of rainbows,
I had no eyes.
Seeing all
I saw the colors fade
and change.
The blood, red dulled
through the dyes,
and the naked
Black-White truth.
Let’s Majeste
I sit a throne upon the times
when Kings are rare and
Consorts
slide into the grease of scullery maids.
So gaily wave a crown of light
(astride the royal chair) that blinds
the commoners who genuflect and cross their fingers.
The years will lie beside me
on the queenly bed.
And coupled we’ll await
the ages’ dust to cake my lids again.
And when the rousing kiss is given,
why must it always be a fairy, and
only just a Prince?
After
No sound falls
from the moaning sky
No scowl wrinkles
the evening pool
The stars lean down
A stony brilliance
While birds fly
The market leers
its empty shelves
Streets bare bosoms
to scanty cars
This bed yawns
beneath the weight
of our absent selves.
The Mothering Blackness
She came home running
back to the mothering blackness
deep in the smothering blackness
white tears icicle gold plains of her face
She came home running
She came down creeping
here to the black arms waiting
now to the warm heart waiting
rime of alien dreams befrost her rich brown face
She came down creeping
She came home blameless
black yet as Hagar’s daughter
tall as was Sheba’s daughter
threats of northern winds die on the desert’s face
She came home blameless
On Diverse Deviations
When love is a shimmering curtain
Before a door of chance
That leads to a world in question
Wherein the macabrous dance
Of bones that rattle in silence
Of blinded eyes and rolls
Of thick lips thin, denying
A thousand powdered moles,
Where touch to touch is feel
And life a weary whore
I would be carried off, not gently
To a shore,
Where love is the scream of anguish
And no curtain drapes the door.
Mourning Grace
If today, I follow death
go down its trackless wastes,
salt my tongue on hardened tears
for my precious dear times waste
race
along that promised cave in a headlong
deadlong
haste,
Will you
have
the
grace
to mourn for
me?
How I Can Lie to You
now thread my voice
with lies
of lightness
force within
my mirror eyes
the cold disguise
of sad and wise
decisions.
Sounds Like Pearls
Sounds
Like pearls
Roll off your tongue
To grace this eager ebon ear.
Doubt and fear,
Ungainly things,
With blushings
Disappear.
PART TWO
Just Before the World Ends
When I Think About Myself
When I think about myself,
I almost laugh myself to death,
My life has been one great big joke,
A dance that’s walked
A song that’s spoke,
I laugh so hard I almost choke
When I think about myself.
Sixty years in these folks’ world
The child I works for calls me girl
I say “Yes ma’am” for working’s sake.
Too proud to bend
Too poor to break,
I laugh until my stomach ache,
When I think about myself.
My folks can make me split my side,
I laughed so hard I nearly died,
The tales they
tell, sound just like lying,
They grow the fruit,
But eat the rind,
I laugh until I start to crying,
When I think about my folks.
On a Bright Day, Next Week
On a bright day, next week
Just before the bomb falls
Just before the world ends,
Just before I die
All my tears will powder
Black in dust like ashes
Black like Buddha’s belly
Black and hot and dry
Then will mercy tumble
Falling down in godheads
Falling on the children
Falling from the sky
Letter to an Aspiring Junkie
Let me hip you to the streets,
Jim,
Ain’t nothing happening.
Maybe some tomorrows gone up in smoke,
raggedy preachers, telling a joke
to lonely, son-less old ladies’ maids.
Nothing happening,
Nothing shakin’, Jim.
A slough of young cats riding that
cold, white horse,
a grey old monkey on their back, of course
does rodeo tricks.
No haps, man.
No haps.
A worn-out pimp, with a space-age conk,
setting up some fool for a game of tonk,
or poker or
get ’em dead and alive.