A Brave and Startling Truth

Have you ever checked out a library book, taken it home, started to read it—and then, felling silly for having taken it home in the first place, ended up finishing it in under twenty minutes? That recently happened to me when reading Neil Gaiman’s Odd and the Frost Giants. It also happened with a little book by Maya Angelou called A Brave and Startling Truth.

To be fair, I usually have to sprint around the library, dashing and grabbing a random book here or there that looks good to me. Gone are the days spent perusing the books leisurely, lovingly; now we run in, hit the children’s library first, and if I’m lucky, I get to grab a couple of my own on the way out. (To combat this, I’ve learned to make library lists at home by reserving a handful of books online and having them available for pickup when we visit. It’s not the same as browsing—the site doesn’t make it easy to find books similar to those I like, the way I would be able to do while browsing—but it’s almost like shopping and getting a nice book stack from Amazon.com without having to pay!)

Anyhow, I grabbed the little book because it was an Angelou book I hadn’t read yet and figured I’d love it. Well, I did love it, but it was only the single title poem in the book! Talk about a waste of print. As much as trees are dwindling and carbon dioxide levels are rising these days, I’d think this book would’ve been better off as a part of a larger collection. I suppose the page numbers wouldn’t have made much of a difference, but what about the covers?

Either way, it’s a fantastic poem (which, by the way, can also be accessed online if you search for it) about how, yes, we have our problems and yes, we have so much destruction to combat but we are such an amazing creation—people, that is—that how could we not perform miracles and heal the world? Our hands can strike with such abandon, Angelou admits, but those very same hands can also “touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness.”

We are of this planet, she reminds us, and we have the power to create on it a world where people can live freely—both men and women—and compares us to the awesomeness of the natural wonders we’ve been gifted with, such as the Grand Canyon and Mount Fuji. But despite the beauty of all of these incredible things, she says, they cannot heal the land, create peace, make the world better; it’s up to us, the people of the planet, to do just that.