"When Great Trees Fall," by Maya Angelou

When Angelou originally wrote this poem in 1987, under the title, “When Great Trees Fall,” it was in tribute to the writer James Baldwin; she read the poem aloud at his funeral in December of that year.

When she collected it for her 1990 volume of poetry, I Shall Not Be Moved, she expanded the elegy by renaming the poem, “Ailey, Baldwin, Floyd, Killens, and Mayfield,” honoring dancer Alvin Ailey, writer James Baldwin, music educator Samuel A. Floyd Jr., writer John Oliver Killens, and actor Julian Mayfield.

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.

+ Maya Angelou