Ogden Nash, ‘With My Own Eyes,’ 1950, Or,America Isn't So Bad After All

View this long poem (but very much worth the reading!) here. Click the magnifying glass "+" several times if the font is too small for you (as it was for me). Or go find and purchase a first edition of Nash's The Private Dining Room, which is where I discovered the poem.

Maya Angelou (1928 — 2014)

Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes, late 1950s
(photo Chuck Stewart via USA Today)

Poet and activist Maya Angelou died this morning. She was 86. I first became aware of her when she read her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" at Bill Clinton's inauguration, but her life encompassed far more than the works that made her famous.

Civil rights activist, actor and playwright, club entertainer, and occasionally author banned from library shelves (always a high honor in my opinion), Angelou had more to say than many of the rest of us, and said it so very, very finely. See the wiki.

Robert Frost: 'The Aim Was Song'

Before man came to blow it right
The wind once blew itself untaught,
And did its loudest day and night
In any rough place where it caught.

Man came to tell it what was wrong:
It hadn't found the place to blow;
It blew too hard - the aim was song.
And listen - how it ought to go!

He took a little in his mouth,
And held it long enough for north
To be converted into south,
And then by measure blew it forth.

By measure. It was word and note,
The wind the wind had meant to be -
A little through the lips and throat.
The aim was song - the wind could see.

Robert Frost

(There are several readings on YouTube, some of them lamentably bad. This one has some redeeming virtues.)

(Apologies for the error in the first line, since corrected. I can only plead that I copy-pasted from an online source that had an even worse error in the same line.)