I can't believe the news I'm reading. A great light left this world when Maya Angelou passed away.

Her poetry is what inspired me to start writing my own at age 13. Prior to that, I only wrote songs and stories, and I'm not sure I'd have ever written a single line of poetry without having been so moved by hers.

Part of falling together is drifting gently apart
as the years and the tides do their dirty work,
the waves washing away sand and rock,
morphing the coastline we worked to create.

It is not destruction—it is simply change.
It is nature in her softest and most natural state.
She's not whipping up tornadoes and typhoons—
just gentle lapping of the sea by light of the moon.