Golden Shovel after Maya Angelou’s “On the Pulse of Morning”

In the last third, there is no one to speak to but You,
and still, my mouth is unable to perform what I was created
to do. Prayer, an oasis in the midst of the nighttime desert / If only
I was brave enough to resist sleep, to climb over my shame, a
heavy cloak that I cannot roll out from under / my little
body is no match for my monstrous ego. The depths of regret sink me lower
and lower / fleeting is time and all of its promise, weaker am I than
my ancestors. I do not know how they did this, was the–
re no chaos inside themselves? How, as only humans and not angels? 

I do not know what happened to me but I have
forgotten how to crawl to water, how to stay crouched
in desperation, how to see my own thin-boned and too
famished soul / and feed it. This bed is a death bed, a long
and lonely prison (but it feels nothing like one). I recall the in–
nocence of childhood, the fragility of my unripened faith, the
sanctity of the night, the friendliness of God. Such bruising
and blistering and bleeding comes with aging / a violent Darkness!

Is this to be it, me trapped in a soliloquy of mourning? Have
I been condemned to a life of bedridden lamentation, the villain
in my own tragedy? Who is to blame for the withering but me? Too
large is the longing / too harrowing is the loss / too long
is the journey back I fear I would not make it. What I wouldn’t give for a face
full of earth, forehead pressed into the nighttime! To lower my head down
and to feel myself lifted higher! To breathe in the perfume of Hope in
large, massive gulps. Each ayah, a gentle salve on the wounds of my Ignorance. 

How to wake from slumber I do not know. How to rise from beneath your
own cowardice, and face your Maker, I do not know. Like mammouths,
the words are lodged in me, fossilized in enormous majesty, spilling
out in frozen syllables. I dig and dig, looking for something, not words
but a feeling, an ancient and weathered one. Where is she, that tender, unharmed
infant within me? Where is it, that still green, resilient yearning for
God’s mercy? What hangs in the balance / a solemn survivor of the slaughter?

—

(The Golden Shovel poetic form was created by Terrence Hayes. The form utilizes a line or stanza or entire poem written by someone else and uses each word in its ordering as the ending of a new line of poetry. This poem was created using the third stanza of Maya Angelou’s “On The Pulse of Morning” inaugural poem from 1993.)