I’ve spent more than my usual time this past week in TV studios, speaking to journalists and doing interviews. The reason has been a media statement published by Scottish Care about the current state of discussions around the National Care Home Contract. In some of these interviews I mentioned as I have before both in discussions and in this blog that care homes are having to close their doors because they cannot make ends meet. I’m not going to go over the nuts and bolts of those decisions and discussions here, but I want to briefly this week share something of the impact upon those who are in a care home when a decision is made to close.

The first thing to say is that you can never generalise about the closure of a care home. They happen for many reasons but more recently they have been happening on the grounds of cost and sustainability. A recent example of this is one which for me comes very close to home.

Around a month ago the news broke that one of the oldest charities in Glasgow had announced it is to close and carefully wind-down the running of its care home in the west end of Glasgow after nearly 200 years. This was the first care home I ever visited – as a primary school pupil in a nearby school. Even then I was impressed by the palpable sense of love and compassion in the place. I remember going home and saying that it was a ‘special place.’  I have visited friends, acquaintances, and neighbours over the years in the home, a place which I walked by most weeks of my early life. The depth of compassion, of life lived before the end, of family welcome were so memorable – yet after all the challenges of the decades including the hell which was Covid-19 the home is to close. Media coverage stating the reasons as:

“severe and unsustainable cash flow problems stemming from the rising costs and challenges of running a major care facility”, the administrators said.

This included staff shortages, costs of sourcing agency staff, rising food and energy bills, compliance costs and falling occupancy levels.”

I will miss Balmanno House but sadly I know and have been told of so many more care homes which have had to close primarily because of staffing and recruitment costs, of sustainability around energy and other commodities – and all because of an inadequate level of public funding. Closures which hit the local media, but which are going largely unnoticed amidst all the political grandstanding and front-page headlines of recent days and weeks.

It is a generally received wisdom that when a care home closes it has a negative impact on staff and most importantly residents even in shortening life and decreasing wellbeing. That is certainly the anecdotal wisdom of many families and those who work in the sector. Prof Jon Glasby of Birmingham has and is undertaking research in the area and suggests that that may not always be the case if the care home had poor quality provision before its closure. Glasby’s research is probably accurate but what is happening up and down the country these last few months and especially in rural and remote areas is not the closure of homes which were in decline but that high quality care homes are having to close not because they are providing a poor service but because they cannot afford to stay open or cannot get staff. That is very different. The trauma and upset of dislocation from a place of contentment is much sharper and rawer than leaving a place of dissatisfaction.

I want to briefly share some of the conversations I have been having with staff, managers and families in the last few weeks and months because sometimes when you hear about a care home close or when you read numbers and statistics, we can fail to understand the experience and lived reality behind the headline.

Mary was a resident in the care home for five years and when she entered the home she really didn’t want to be there and on her own admission she gave the staff hell because she was so desperate to get home and thought that her daughter had abandoned her. But with perseverance and positivity the staff nurtured Mary’s confidence and slowly as she puts it ‘the ice thawed’ and she began to settle in – indeed it only took a couple of weeks. After that she openly confesses that these last few years have been amongst the best of her life. Of course, she misses her own place, but she will tell you straight out that she just was no longer able to look after herself because of her frailty and that she had had two hips replaced after falls. She was immensely lonely and had sunk deep into herself even though she had good support from homecare staff. What the care home did was to bring her back to life and much to the surprise of family and others she was thriving. She formed new friends and loved the range of activities and what she described as a constant sense of fun. The staff were brilliant but she also said that so many had left after Covid and there were many new staff or staff who only came for a short period, and this had changed the place. Then they got the news of the closure and Mary was not the only one who got really depressed and saddened.

When I met Mary she was trying to be positive for everyone around her but it struck me after years working in the fields of loss and grief that plain and simple what Mary was experiencing was a bereavement, a loss of the familiar in her new place; a loss of relationship with folks she had come to love both staff and residents because most had not followed in her steps to the new home she was now in some 20 miles from where she had been. She was determined not to be down and to fight the black mood – but what I witnessed in Mary was grief pure and simple. A grief that need not have happened, a grief for which many of the staff around her now were ill equipped to support. But more than that and Mary confessed this – she was worried about making new friends, making the effort of getting to know folks for the fear that in a few months it would all happen again. Grief is first and foremost the fracturing of love and if that brokenness is one that could have been avoided you are much more wary of being vulnerable to love.

When a care home closes its impact on residents is personal and profound. It is a loss and bereavement which we need to support but it is also one which we should all be doing as much as we can to avoid in the first place.

Jim was the manager of the care home which Mary was a resident in. To be fair Jim could see the writing on the wall as he attended the meetings of the charity trustees which ran the home. Money was not so much tight as non-existent. Donations for the small community-based charity had dried up so much and there was a black hole in them during Covid from which they never recovered. ‘Folks gave to the big causes that were on TV,’ he would say ‘not to the local places.’ The trustees made the decision to close because they simply were running out of money with all the increased costs, and they could not persuade the local authority funders to pay more for the residential care and support they provided.

Jim had over 30 years’ experience in the care sector and worked across so many different groups, but he found his niche and became a manger – indeed an award winning manager renowned for supporting staff, working closely with families and integrating the home into the life of the local school and community. But as he closed the door on the home for the last time, he told me that he could not but shed a tear for all the stories told inside its doors, all the love and loss, the sheer fun and laughter he had had inside.

Jim too was a man who was grieving – having not just lost his job – indeed he was now working outside the care sector – but having lost the place where he said to me, he had become the person he was when I met him. He was sure that the place and the people had given more to him than he had to them. It as not, in his words, just about bricks and mortar. His last act was in memory for all who had passed through the gate and door – it was to hang a wreath.

For Jim and Mary, you could count many hundreds more. Behind the closure of a care home, the dislocation of its residents and the loss of livelihood for staff, is an undoubted grieving process, a bereavement of place and memory, of folk and feelings, of special times; of safe space and held love.

In all the politics and wrangling over finance and priority, in all the debate over culpability and responsibility – I hope we never forget folks like Jim and Mary – it is their living and loving that is changed forever when a care home closes.

Donald Macaskill

 

Yesterday was the Scottish Care, Care at Home and Housing Support conference which was held in Glasgow with the theme ‘Keeping Care at Home’. It was followed by an evening Awards ceremony in which participants were able to thank the amazing women and men who have worked in homecare across the country over the last year.

The day was one which was both inspiring and also concerning because so many of the conversations I held with those who were attending underlined in the strongest terms the degree of crisis and challenge which is being faced by the homecare sector across Scotland.

Politically and societally, there is a lot of agreement about homecare. People know that should their health deteriorate and decline, should the passage of time mean that they are less able and fit than they once were, then the place they would want to be is in their own home. The familiarity of place is critical to the psychological and emotional health we all know to be fundamental to our wellbeing.

There is also a generally accepted recognition that one of the ways in which we can help people avoid unnecessary admission to hospital is to keep them healthy and well at home. This not only prevents avoidable hospital admissions with all the pressures that brings on the whole health and social care system but more importantly with all the risks that being in hospital for periods of time brings to the individual themselves.

Over the last few weeks and winter/spring months there has been a great deal of media and political focus on delayed discharge – that is when people are unnecessarily delayed in being discharged from hospital when they are fit for discharge. There has been equal focus and attention – and indeed resource – being allocated to ‘hospital at home’ models and innovations. All of these are to be applauded and affirmed because they adhere to the great principles of the NHS, which is to treat, care and support individuals as close to home and community as possible.

But what about preventative social care? It is all very well to develop important initiatives to get people out of hospital and to support them in their own homes when they are discharged, but it would be so much better if we prevented or at least delayed for as long as possible admission into hospital. That is where social care systems and supports when they work well are able to make such a significant contribution.

One of the really negative impacts of austerity and the increasing resource swallowed up by the acute NHS systems has been the stripping out of the preventative approach, systems and models in social care. This has been a dangerous and damaging error. The less we spend on preventative social care the more we end up spending on the acute and secondary NHS.

Preventative social care comes in many guises. It is first and foremost relationship based social care where the support worker or carer is able over time to form a meaningful relationship with the supported person. Such a depth relationship – which requires continuity of staffing and consistency of service – build not only a relationship but critically enables the worker to develop the insights, knowledge and awareness that enables him or her to be aware of changes in the behaviour, presentation and health of the supported person. Without being overly idealistic – this is what good old-fashioned relationship-based care at home used to deliver as routine. Care staff knew their clients and were the early warning systems which recognised a negative response to new medication, which questioned the benefits of multiple drugs, which enabled a person to be independent rather than nurture dependency, which reduced the harms of loneliness and isolation, which monitored incidents such as falls, memory loss and deterioration and so much more.

Such good and effective preventative social care requires many things – not least of which is a staffing cohort which are valued, rewarded appropriately for their skills, and esteemed as core professionals and colleagues by others in a primary or community acre team. Their word, judgement and awareness are heard and respected.

But it also requires that most elusive of care and clinical tools – time. The sad increase in 15-minute care packages and visits over the last few years – at a time when we were supposed to be ending them – has had a deep impact on the quality of time staff are able to spend with individuals. I defy anyone to justify that such time slots offer dignified, right-based, relationship-focussed social care. They are transactions of function rather than timeslots of compassionate care and support.

There is another element to preventative social care which is often forgotten. Prevention of negative health incidents and decline requires an individual to self-manage a long-term condition or to be at the very least aware of the factors that might impact them in a negative way. Preventative social care can encourage folks to be more proactive and knowledgeable about their health and wellbeing. I think we are missing a great public health opportunity by not enabling social care staff to be the frontline of such public education, awareness, and promotion of self-management. If they have a relationship with the supported person, it is already a door open to increased awareness and communication. Good preventative social care which utilises the contact between carer and supported person could significantly lead to increased independence and thus reduce or delay the need for care and support services.

But prevention does not just happen – it is not an accidental by-product but something which has to be designed, nurtured, and resourced. I would love to see equal resource and emphasis being placed on investment in social care especially care at home and housing support being seen as a preventative tool as equally important as the resource we allocate to getting people out of hospital or caring from them clinically in their own home. But of course, that requires whole system, holistic health and social care thinking and co-ordination rather than just attending to one part of the system.

Donald Macaskill

This blog formed part of a speech delivered at Erskine Home, Renfrewshire to celebrate the International Day of the Nurse 2023.

As many of you might know from some of my blogs and talks – I come from a family of strong Highland women!

When I was growing up there were two professions which dominated my family environment – both occupied by strong women – teaching and nursing.

One of those I want to talk about is my great aunt who had she been alive would be over 140 years old. She was ‘widowed’ in the First World War – though in truth she was never married but engaged to a young man who lost his life in the trenches but for whom she ever after wore the black of widowhood and never married.

She was an astonishingly literate and widely read woman who was a headteacher with an indomitable and quite ferocious spirit. In fact, she was quite scary! But she had wonderful stories and being a bit of a sponge, I soaked many of them up only realising their significance a lot later. She had an array of friends all over the country and indeed the world. Many of them like her were strong characters.

One of the people she occasionally talked about was someone a good 14 years younger than herself but with whom she shared a real affinity. Her name was Mairi Chisholm whom some of you may know though I suspect many of you might not – but in her day she was probably one of the most famous and photographed nurses of her generation.

Mairi Lambert Gooden Chisholm, of Chisholm (1896-1981), known as Mairi Chisholm, was an ambulance driver and first aider and then nurse on the Western Front in Belgium during the First World War.

Brought up in England but from very Highland stock, Mairi was deeply influenced by her older brother, Uailean, who owned a Royal Enfield 425cc motorcycle. She adored motorcycles and persuaded her father to buy her one which she spent days stripping down and putting back together. She was 18 years old when she met the 30-year-old Elsie Knocker, who shared the same passion for motorcycling, and they became good friends

At the outbreak of the First World War, Mairi and Elsie travelled to London on motorcycles to offer their services to the War Office. It was when working as dispatch drivers that they were spotted by Dr Hector Munro, a Scottish doctor and founder of the volunteer Flying Ambulance Corps (FAC), who invited them to join him on the front in Belgium from September 1914.

Mairi Chisholm and Elsie Knocker, became known as the ‘women or angels of Pervyse’ and together they saved the lives of thousands of soldiers and won numerous medals for bravery.

What marked them out as different was that they soon came to the conclusion that they could save more lives by treating the wounded directly on the front lines rather than transporting casualties to hospitals. They set up one hundred yards from the trenches and they called their place “Poste de Secours Anglais” (“British First Aid Post”). They spent the next three and a half years tending to the wounded.

It was an astonishingly hard time, not least in that they had to raise their own funds for their new station. Then in March 1918, they were both badly affected by a bombing raid and gas attacks on their field hospital and were invalided home. Chisholm was able to return briefly to Pervijze, before being gassed again; she was only 22 years old.

She went on to live a colourful and fulfilling life and after many more adventures died in Argyll in 1981.

Back to my great aunt. She recalled conversations she had with Mairi about what it was like to nurse and what she learned from the experience in the First World War. There are several things which both Mairi and Elsie showed which I think on this International Day of the Nurse still are apposite and are the essence of nursing.

The first is that at the start of their work Mairi and Elsie were not nurses – they had received the most basic of training but over the years developed real experience and skill so much so that they were feted by the media and others as exemplars of what nursing should be both during the war and for the decade after.

But my aunt always pointed out that Mairi consistently said that what mattered most was not the uniform you wore, the unit you belonged to, but the skills and talents you developed and displayed.

There is a lot of necessary debate about what should constitute the core skills and competencies of modern-day nursing. Indeed, I have written and commented about how important that debate is, not least when we are faced with the shortage of registered nurses working in social care. It is fundamental that we know and agree what for instance are the boundaries of role and competence between a nurse and say a senior carer.

But what was intrinsically true for Mairi was that regardless of training or title, what ultimately mattered was the ability to use skills in the service of the individual rather than the validation of personal nursing identity. What was critical was the whole team and group effort rather than the elevation of one role, however important, over another.

And a care home is an exemplar par excellence of that – it is only when acting in concert and together that we ensure the individual resident receives the best possible care and support that they deserve.

The second thing I remember being told about Mairi was that she had a passionate belief that treatment and care must go to the person and not the other way around. Now that’s a relatively easy statement to make – in fact it is the ethos of the developing concepts and delivery of hospital at home programmes and approaches – we have many of us known for long that the community should be the cradle of clinical care and not the acute hospital alone.

For Mairi that belief and conviction was one that was immensely dangerous and harrowing. It meant that quite literally she was under fire all the time – a reality that caused damage to her health which would result in a life-long impact both physically and psychologically.

But in truth that is what is still true today – we go to where people need us and when they require that support. For Mairi nursing was about being useful where you were needed – nursing was in the place and space it was necessary to be.

The third thing I heard from my aunt was that nursing and care in general was first and foremost about relationship. In an emergency war situation, you might think there was a risk that with real life and death pressures that care and support became transactional, perhaps even mechanistic and automatic.

Far from it- in her writings and in her conversation Mairi Chisholm emphasised how important it was that we see care and support, whether given by a nurse or a carer as something which if it was to be effective had to be grounded in the formation of a close and meaningful personal relationship with the person being supported and cared for.

That insight seems almost a taken for granted view of care and support today but at the time it was something that was not all that commonplace. The citations for the many medals they received demonstrated the personal care and compassion that the ‘Angels of Pervyse’ displayed.

Nursing and care were for them and must be for us today about making people feel that they mattered, that you listened to them and heard what they were wanting and needing.

And perhaps finally that is no more than true in a context of nursing in the face of death.

Those of us in this room who have been granted the privilege to be present with someone as they die; to nurture their leaving of life in a way that gives them comfort, that reduces fear and offers solace; those who have felt the pulse of life leave a body, will be well accustomed to the special character of those times, and to their continual hardness.

I suspect the majority of us will not like Mairi and Elsie have had to deal with trauma quite as severe, but each death brings its own special moment of memory for those left behind, and the care and compassion, the practical assurance and skill that is shown at such times to a care home resident are our gift to a family starting the steps of their grief journey.

I could go on about Mairi Chisholm and the memories of my great aunt a lot – but those key aspects I feel have something to say to us nearly 120 years later.

They are that nursing and care and support have to do with recognising the intrinsic value of the person who occupies a nursing role and the critical role of being part of a team; they are that for care and support to be effective nursing and care needs to go to where the person is and to their space and place; that relationship which discovers the person is at the heart of nursing and lastly that it is the accompanying of another in the last hours and moments of their living that the humanity of our roles comes to the fore.

Social care nursing and care are many things – it is a discipline and profession which has been so grossly under-appreciated and valued – and which slowly is coming out of the shadows to shout and celebrate its unique complementary offer to the whole of care support and nursing.

Social care nursing is in some senses – a bit like Mairi Chisholm’s attempts to describe her role – beyond description – but its dynamic is the presence of familiarity in the midst of uncertainty; the valuing of individuality ; the creation of space that heals and holds; the ability to listen beyond and below what is said; the instinctive knowingness which comes from presence which goes beyond the physical.

But in the end of the day whether for a nurse, or a carer, or a domestic member of staff it all boils down to the person inside that uniform.

Mairi Chisholm, challenged expectation and displayed a humanity of compassion and courageous care to the end of her days; she became a pin up of the media of her time ; but she sought not fame or fortune; but to make a difference and in everything you do you can be assured that that is what you do every day – and for that we thank you. You truly make a difference.

Biographical Details taken from:  Our Records: Mairi Chisholm (1896-1981), ambulance driver and first aider in the First World War | ScotlandsPeople

Donald Macaskill

Today is a day when history will be made. That’s probably the understatement of the hour because you would be hard pressed to have avoided awareness of the fact that today is the Coronation of Charles III. I am not going to go anywhere near the ‘politics’, the pros and cons of the event – there has already been enough trees destroyed and energy wasted in the commentary and run up to this day. What I am interested in is the historical significance of the day because I have always been fascinated by history.

At school when others loved the stimulation of science and mathematical conundrums I was always fascinated with the stories of people, more so the real stories of real folk, rather than the history of crowns and empires. Indeed, I was fortunate enough to have fantastic teachers who brought alive the story of the past in a way that made it enjoyable and interesting, and this was years before the absolute glorious delight of today’s Horrible Histories.

History and the events of the past shape our present and give some meaning to our future. So it is that in the years to come people will be able to reflect on the events of this day and no doubt will talk about them to others, especially if they were physically there or if there is a specific significance to the story for them.

One of my first experiences of being in a care setting was listening to a resident telling her experience of the late Queen’s Coronation. Recalling the delight of having the first television in the street, of neighbours crowding into their front room brought back more than just memories of the moment, it brought back to her long gone faces and forgotten smells, absent touches and lost tears, for of such are the windows into our past that bring transparency to our today.

I do not know what the memories and stories of this day will be for the future, but all of us are made up of the sinews of stories told by others in a long line of memories recalled.

In one of those strange juxtapositions of time this is Local and Community History Month. ‘The aim of the month is to increase awareness of local history, promote history in general to the local community and encourage all members of the community to participate.’

Every community is overflowing with stories of who have over the years and centuries made that place what it has become. What makes a place special, for me at least, and something I love to explore when I visit somewhere new, is not just the stories of the great and the good (or more often the not so great and the even less good), but the tales of ordinary life, however hard, that create the energy of our communities. The problem often is that it is rare that their story is heard or told. It is not just the victors who write the history.

But in no small way we are the story-bearers of our own places and it is through our words that the children of today learn the stories of our time. Everyone is a teacher of history.

I wonder what the story of this day will be which we will pass down to generations as yet unborn. Undoubtedly on this ‘special’ and unique day there will be the pomp and circumstance, the glitz and glamour, the celebrity and nobility, maybe even the quiet and spiritual. But that will only tell part of the story.

What about those who are little mentioned in the narratives of memory? What about the insights of those who live with disability, the recollections of those on the margins of memory, the experience of those who are struggling today in mental health, in material possession, or simply with hope?  What about the old and the labelled, those who struggle with life and who ache with grief? What about the stories of the uninvited and the unnoticed, the echoes of those whose music we have grown deaf to, those whose experiences we have become blasé to?

History has an immense power to teach, inspire and guide but only if we listen to all its teachers? I hope today as well as all the informed commentators and history pundits, we will give space to the stories that are but whispers through the cheers, but whose truth for tomorrow’s listening is as valuable as any on this day.

Carol Ann Duffy gloriously re-writes our expectations of history in a poem which has now become a favourite of examiners:

he woke up old at last, alone,

bones in a bed, not a tooth

in her head, half dead, shuffled

and limped downstairs

in the rag of her nightdress,

smelling of pee.

Slurped tea, stared

at her hand–twigs, stained gloves–

wheezed and coughed, pulled on

the coat that hung from a hook

on the door, lay on the sofa,

dozed, snored.

She was History.

She’d seen them ease him down

from the Cross, his mother gasping

for breath, as though his death

was a difficult birth, the soldiers spitting,

spears in the earth;

been there

when the fisherman swore he was back

from the dead; seen the basilicas rise

in Jerusalem, Constantinople, Sicily; watched

for a hundred years as the air of Rome

turned into stone;

witnessed the wars,

the bloody crusades, knew them by date

and by name, Bannockburn, Passchendaele,

Babi Yar, Vietnam. She’d heard the last words

of the martyrs burnt at the stake, the murderers

hung by the neck,

seen up-close

how the saint whistled and spat in the flames,

how the dictator strutting and stuttering film

blew out his brains, how the children waved

their little hands from the trains. She woke again,

cold, in the dark,

in the empty house.

Bricks through the window now, thieves

in the night. When they rang on her bell

there was nobody there; fresh graffiti sprayed

on her door, shit wrapped in a newspaper posted

onto the floor.

From Feminine Gospels by Carol Ann Duffy. copyright © 2003 by Carol Ann Duffy. Published in April 2003 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.

History by Carol Ann Duffy – Poems | Academy of American Poets

Donald Macaskill

This past week I had the pleasure of spending some time with social care colleagues from the rest of the United Kingdom and Ireland. The Five Nations Care Forum is now in its second decade and is an opportunity for the leaders of social care representatives’ bodies to come together twice a year to share insights, experiences, suggestions and support on issues of the day. There is so much that unites the countries regardless of diverse governmental, operational and regulatory systems.

One of the constant themes and words used during our exchanges this week was that of ‘confidence.’ There was a sense that one of the most significant risks to the delivery of social care support both in residential and nursing care homes, and in care at home and housing support was the lack of confidence which existed. There was a lack of confidence in the focus, resolve and ability of our political leadership to lead us out of many of the current challenges. There was a lack of confidence that the role, contribution, and professionalism of our social care support workforce was sufficiently valued and even understood. There was a lack of confidence felt by organisations unwilling to invest, plan and innovate for the future when so many things were uncertain and up in the air. We concluded our considerations by issuing a media statement arguing that now is the time to globally articulate a new vision, a fresh direction and a new passion for social care and that in the coming months we would seek to work to do so. http://www.fivenationscareforum.com/going-global/

Confidence is an interesting phenomenon, sometimes an elusive experience. As the Chambers dictionary states:

‘“etymologically, confidence comes from Latin, specifically the noun confīdentia from the verb confīdere “to confide.”… the verb fīdere means “to trust.” The related Latin noun fidēs “trust” is the ultimate source of the English word faith.”

Do we have trust and faith that the future of social care is one that we can consider to be safe and secure? Confidence needs the energy of faith to feed it and nurture hope into reality. For those who use social care supports, who work in the sectors, and who care for its priority and aims, there is no alternative but to continue to struggle to increase confidence and to raise our voices above the din of disinterested silence.

I ended my week with two critical meetings of providers of care home and homecare provision in Scotland. These are dark and challenging times and the lack of focus and urgency by so many with the ability to make decisions which can bring real change is frustrating and depressing. As key national discussions are ongoing, I cannot comment at this stage but anyone working in social care in Scotland knows that the next few days and weeks are critical to the survival of the sector and that we require political leadership to work in partnership to achieve positive outcomes for all.

But one thing I am convinced of is that regardless of short-term outcomes, there is a passion, a fire, a resolve in the belly of the body social care, to renew itself, to be heard, to advocate for those with no voice, to reform and reshape the way we care and support, to no longer be the pliant child who receives the scraps of attention and focus, but to shout aloud about the glorious, wonder which is a life transformed by the care and compassion which good social care delivers and promises.

In that I can find no better expression than in the glorious words of one of my all-time favourites Maya Angelou. She wrote this about her own sassy sexuality and self – but I can just as much see these words as speaking for social care today. We are not, we dare not lose confidence, social care support in Scotland shall rise.

Still I Rise

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

 

Does my sassiness upset you?

Why are you beset with gloom?

’Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells

Pumping in my living room.

 

Just like moons and like suns,

With the certainty of tides,

Just like hopes springing high,

Still I’ll rise.

 

Did you want to see me broken?

Bowed head and lowered eyes?

Shoulders falling down like teardrops,

Weakened by my soulful cries?

 

Does my haughtiness offend you?

Don’t you take it awful hard

’Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines

Diggin’ in my own backyard.

 

You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I’ll rise.

 

Does my sexiness upset you?

Does it come as a surprise

That I dance like I’ve got diamonds

At the meeting of my thighs?

 

Out of the huts of history’s shame

I rise

Up from a past that’s rooted in pain

I rise

I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,

Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

 

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear

I rise

Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear

I rise

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,

I am the dream and the hope of the slave.

I rise

I rise

I rise.

Maya Angelou, “Still I Rise” from And Still I Rise: A Book of Poems.  Copyright © 1978 by Maya Angelou.  Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Source: The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou (1994)

Still I Rise by Maya Angelou | Poetry Foundation

Donald Macaskill