‘These Yet-to-Be United States’ : Clinton has chosen well in inviting poet Maya Angelou to the inauguration

Tremors of your network cause kings to disappear. Your open mouth in anger makes nations bow in fear. Your bombs can change the seasons, obliterate the spring. What more do you long for? Why are you suffering? You control the human lives in Rome and Timbuktu. Lonely nomads wandering owe Telstar to you. Seas shift at your bidding, Your mushrooms fill the sky. Why are you unhappy? Why do your children cry? They kneel alone in terror with dread in every glance. Their nights are threatened clearly by a grim inheritance. You dwell in whitened castles with deep and poisoned moats and cannot hear the curses which fill your children’s throats. Maya Angelou, who published the provocative poem “These Yet-to-Be United States” as part of her 1990 collection “I Shall Not Be Moved,” has accepted an invitation from fellow Arkansan Bill Clinton to read a poem at the presidential inauguration, and she says she is planning to write a work for the occasion.

Commenting on it to a reporter, she recently said: “I don’t know the poem yet. But I can feel it in me. I do want to say this is one country and our differences and uniquenesses make us stronger, rather than divide us.”

The title of Angelou’s 1990 book paraphrases “We Shall Not Be Moved,” a song from the 1960s civil rights movement. The most famous song of that struggle, “We Shall Overcome,” contains the line “Black and white together”--a sentiment often reflected in her work.

Angelou’s vision is the fruit of her exceptionally demanding experience of being an African-American woman in Africa. Her years in Ghana led her to the discovery, against every initial wish and expectation, of an inescapably American identity.

Maya Angelou is really black, really American and really concerned about the only country she will ever have. We look forward to her inauguration poem. President-elect Clinton has chosen well.