When Great Trees Fall
Today, Mike Rabow read, "When Great Trees Fall" by Maya Angelou, in honor of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's passing. Since Friday, I've cycled between shock, grief, anxiety, and gratitude. Losing Notorious RBG was devastating not only on a personal, human level, but also on a societal and political level. We owe her a debt of gratitude for all her work on equality and road she has paved for us. We owe it to her and many others, including Maya Angelou, to continue the struggle for equality, against social injustice of any sort. We can be. Be and be better. For they have existed. And today, it feels like we must be and better for so much is at stake.
Thank you, RBG, for blazing the trail as long as you could and for being an outstanding role model. May we pick up the torch you have passed us and hold it high.
When Great Trees Fall
Maya Angelou
When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.
When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.
When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.
Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance,
fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance
of
dark, cold
caves.
And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.