July 17, 2026

Face It Then Let It Go

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.

Maya Angelou wrote and read this poem at Bill Clinton's 1993 presidential inauguration, the first poet to do so since Robert Frost in 1961. She was speaking to a nation still carrying the weight of slavery, segregation, and generations of unhealed wounds, urging people to look history in the face rather than bury it. Her point was not to forget the pain but to stop letting it repeat itself in the present. That is the heart of real forgiveness: acknowledging what happened fully, then refusing to let it run your life again.