22. We Had Him

After our discussion about elegies, I went in search of one for Michael Jackson. It seemed that this would be pretty easy, considering the point of the elegy is to mourn a communal loss, and this was the most obvious one I was able to think of--and it was easy to find. One of the first search hits was a poem by none other than Maya Angelou. Here is a section from the website I got it from:
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Here's a transcript of "We Had Him" (I took a best guess at the line breaks--Angelou may have intended them to fall elsewhere):

Beloveds, now we know that we know nothing,
now that our bright and shining star can slip away from our fingertips
like a puff of summer wind.

Without notice, our dear love can escape our doting embrace.
Sing our songs among the stars and walk our dances across the face of the moon.
In the instant that Michael is gone, we know nothing. No clocks can tell time.
No oceans can rush our tides with the abrupt absence of our treasure.

Though we are many, each of us is achingly alone, piercingly alone.
Only when we confess our confusion can we remember
that he was a gift to us and we did have him.

He came to us from the creator, trailing creativity in abundance.
Despite the anguish, his life was sheathed in mother love, family love,
and survived and did more than that.
He thrived with passion and compassion, humor and style.
We had him whether we know who he was or did not know,
he was ours and we were his.
We had him, beautiful, delighting our eyes.

His hat, aslant over his brow, and took a pose on his toes for all of us.
And we laughed and stomped our feet for him.
We were enchanted with his passion because he held nothing.
He gave us all he had been given.

Today in Tokyo, beneath the Eiffel Tower, in Ghana's Black Star Square.
In Johannesburg and Pittsburgh, in Birmingham, Alabama, and Birmingham, England

We are missing Michael.
But we do know we had him, and we are the world.

The audience responded well to the poem. What do you think?
I find more poignancy in this quote from her book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: "A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song."
Michael didn't seem to have a lot of answers, but for all of his faults, he sang a powerful song.
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I’m incredibly uncertain about how I feel about this poem. Sure, there are some lines that really stand out to me, but I don’t know… with someone like Michael Jackson in particular, paired with a writer as well-known as Angelou, I expected more.

Some sections I liked:

Though we are many, each of us is achingly alone, piercingly alone.
Only when we confess our confusion can we remember
that he was a gift to us and we did have him.

And

He gave us all he had been given.
Today in Tokyo, beneath the Eiffel Tower, in Ghana's Black Star Square.
In Johannesburg and Pittsburgh, in Birmingham, Alabama, and Birmingham, England
We are missing Michael.
But we do know we had him, and we are the world.


These sections worked well. The first nicely illustrates the feeling of alone and togetherness, which I think we feel regardless for death but particularly for such a far-reaching death as Michael Jackson’s. The second I just enjoyed the feel of--again, it shows how far-reaching he was, and that last line was a nice bow to the song.

The rest fell flat for me. It seems so expected, entirely impersonal to the actual subject of the poem. I’m not exactly entitled to critique someone like Maya Angelou, but it just didn’t work for me. “Dotting embrace,” oceans, clocks that don’t tell time? Someone as controversial, celebrated and showy as Michael Jackson was, I think much more could have been done with the language.

“His hat, aslant over his brow, and took a pose on his toes for all of us.”

Again… he was natural a character. This description seems highly unrepresentational.

Anyone else have this problem?