There is a woman who is a role model for any woman in our country. She is a poetess and has written an autobiography. She broke into mainstream America when she read at President Clinton’s inauguration. She read “On the Pulse of the Morning.”

Today she is teaching at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC. My favorite of her books is, “Even the Stars Look Lonesome.” She is a woman who will share her thoughts and what they mean to her.

“The loss of love and youth
and fire came raiding,
riding,
a horde of plunderers
on one caparisoned steed,
sucking up the sun drops,trampling the green shoots

of my carefully planted years.

The evidence: thickened waist and leathery thighs, which triumph
over my fallen insouciance.

After fifty-five
the arena has changed
I must enlist new warriors.
My resistance,
once natural as raised vioces,
importunes in the dark.
Is this battle worth the candle?
Is this war worth the wage?

May I not greet age
without a grouse, allowing
the truly young to own the stage?” —-Maya Angeloe

A starry, starry night

My homage to Maya Angelue