Reading this doesn't compare to hearing it, although there are some fun phrases that sound just as good in the voice in your head as in Maya Angelou's voice (Each of you, a bordered country; No less to you now than the mastodon then). ( )

I can't read this without remembering her reading it herself, aloud, for President Clinton's inauguration. I hear it in her voice, even all of these years later. I think that might have been the first swearing in I actually watched, and so it's fitting that it's still the one I remember best. This poem still gives me goose bumps.

Maya Angelou's extraordinary biographies, including "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," were already part of college English and Humanities courses when former President Bill Clinton tagged her to write "On the Pulse of Morning" for his January 20, 1993 inauguration ceremony. Despite debates regarding whether Angelou is a better prose writer than she is a poet, her inauguration poem is among few, penned by modern poets, that can claim the status of "modern classic." The poet's recital of the work is powerfully majestic and beautifully inspiring.

Aberjhani
author of "I Made My Boy Out of Poetry"
"Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance"
and "Visions of a Skylark Dressed in Black" ( )