The Best Maya Angelou Marriage Poems for Weddings

Maya Angelou died yesterday at the age of 86. I called my husband and cried, mourning for Dr. Maya Angelou’s loss, but mostly for me. So today, I want to honor Maya Angelou by offering readers her best love poems and the Maya Angelou love quotes that guide my heart. These marriage poems are integral to our lives. But especially important to share are the Maya Angelou love poems that were the wedding reading launching the birth of my interracial marriage.

Marriage Poems

On the day Maya Angelou passed away, my husband listened through the tears and told me that I was loved and safe, reminding me yet again that the Maya Angelou love quotes I anchor my life on continue to be beacons that guide my legacy. I continue to lean on her words as I raise mixed race children. Maya describes love to be bold and brave. And on the day I married this beautiful black man, I was bold. I’d been liberated by love.

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Maya Angelou Love Poem

Maya Angelou Wedding Poems

A year before my wedding, a friend and I went to see Maya Angelou speak at The Cashman Field Center in Las Vegas. For as long as I live I will look back on that experience with gratitude. I held my 1980s copy of I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, the scribbles of my younger years etched into the pages where my ticket stub still sits, and as Maya Angelou walked onto the stage, I cried. Much like I’m doing now. Her legacy demands as much.

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Maya was much taller and bigger than I expected for a woman her age. She stood at a solo mic for her entire talk. Her voice was intensely deep. It shook the room. But I can’t remember what she said, only that I was happy.

On my wedding day, as we navigate the roads of interracial marriage, when becoming a ferocious mother raising multiracial children and so many time since that day 5 years ago, I summon the courage of these Maya Angelou quotes and love poems. “Touched by an Angel” was read at our wedding by my best friend and the words still echo true. This love has liberated me.

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Maya Angelou Love Poem

Touched By An Angel Maya Angelou

We, unaccustomed to courage

Exiles from delight

live coiled in shells of loneliness

until love leave its high holy temple

and comes into our sight

to liberate us into life.

Love arrives

and in its train comes ecstasies

old memories of pleasure

ancient histories of pain.

Yet if we are bold,

love strikes away the chains of fear

from our souls.

We are weaned from our timidity

In the flush of love’s light

we dare be brave

And suddly we see

that love costs all we are

and will ever be.

Yet it is only love

which sets us free.

Maya Angelou Love Poetry 

10 years later, my husband and I are still married and raising our mixed-race family the best we can. Every day isn’t easy, but there’s no way we could have gotten this far without the other. When we renew our marriage vows, Alone by Maya Angelou will be our wedding reading.

Alone, Maya Angelou

Lying, thinking
Last night
How to find my soul a home
Where water is not thirsty
And bread loaf is not stone
I came up with one thing
And I don’t believe I’m wrong
That nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

There are some millionaires
With money they can’t use
Their wives run round like banshees
Their children sing the blues
They’ve got expensive doctors
To cure their hearts of stone.
But nobody
No, nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Now if you listen closely
I’ll tell you what I know
Storm clouds are gathering
The wind is gonna blow
The race of man is suffering
And I can hear the moan,
‘Cause nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.