Maya Angelou's take on Election Night

“First I laughed,” she told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. “Before I could finish laughing, I wept. Then I shook. I mean, I trembled. You know, the old meaning of the word `thrill’ has a physical aspect. It’s like, `Brrrrr!’ My body started shaking.”

But the experience was also cerebral. Images of slavery and the civil rights movement and of her slain friend Martin Luther King Jr. raced through her mind, and in that moment, she realized that the United States was finally “growing up.”

“I thought of my people, African-Americans. I thought of white Americans. I thought of Asians and Spanish people. And I thought, `My God! What a country. What a country.’ I believe that in the secret heart of every American there’s a desire to live in a great country. And look at us now.”

“On the Pulse of Morning,” the poem she composed for Clinton, talked of war and divisiveness, but also of hope for a new beginning of peace.

Angelou said Obama is “a clear and clean wind, a breeze. … There is some poetry in him, yes.”