STILL I 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. – Maya Angelou.

_ _

There are poems you read.

And there are poems that read you.

Maya Angelou’s Still I Rise belongs to the second category.

“I rise.”

Emphasizes insistence, identity, and firmness.

If you read with intent, you'll see that what the poem does is take familiar feelings – pain, weakness, cries, survival, and repackage them into something unsettlingly powerful.

She placed them as stepping stones to her stage.

We know what defeat looks like.

We know what suffering looks like.

We know what silence looks like.

But in this poem, even dust refuses its expected role.

Even brokenness refuses to conclude in pieces.

“You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I’ll rise”

Dust is unwanted, insignificant, it settles and disappears.

But here, it rises as something unnatural in its persistence.

Maya Angelou forced the mind to unlearn what it thinks it knows about defeat with this poem.

So still… you have to rise.

Princess Ella ⚜️