The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010
Page 2
dialysis
donor
libation
the photograph: a lynching
jasper texas 1998
alabama 9/15/63
what i think when i ride the train
praise song
august
study the masters
lazarus (first day)
lazarus (second day)
lazarus (third day)
birthday 1999
grief
report from the angel of eden
Mercy (2004)
last words the gift
out of body
dying
last words
oh antic God
april
after one year
sonku
children
stories surely i am able to write poems
mulberry fields
the river between us
cancer
in the mirror
blood
a story
mercy
here rests
after oz
the Phantom
Powell
walking the blind dog
hands
wind on the st. marys river
the tale the shepherds tell the sheep
stop
september song a poem in 7 days 1 tuesday 9/11/01
2 wednesday 9/12/01
3 thursday 9/13/01
4 friday 9/14/01
5 saturday 9/15/01
6 sunday morning 9/16/01
7 monday sundown 9/17/01
the message from The Ones (received in the late 70s)
beginning of message your mother sends you this
come to here
you
we are ones
in the saying of
we are here
why should we wander bone yards
some of you have been blessed
you come to teach
in the geometry
we
god
the angels have no wings
you who feel yourself
you wish to speak of
you are not
the universe requires the worlds
you have placed yourselves
whether in spirit
the air
the patience
what has been made
there is a star
end of message
Voices (2008)
hearing “marley was dead to begin with”
aunt jemima
uncle ben
cream of wheat
horse prayer
raccoon prayer
dog’s god
albino
mataoka
witko
what haunts him
my grandfather’s lullaby
“you have been my tried and trusted friend”
lu 1942
sorrows
being heard this is what i know
my father hasn’t come back
dad
faith
afterblues
the dead do dream
“in 1844 explorers John Fremont and Kit Carson discovered Lake Tahoe”
mirror
6/27/06
in amira’s room
for maude
highway 89 toward tahoe
ten oxherding pictures a meditation on ten oxherding pictures
1st picture searching for the ox
2nd picture seeing the traces
3rd picture seeing the ox
4th picture catching the ox
5th picture herding the ox
6th picture coming home on the ox’s back
7th picture the ox forgotten leaving the man alone
8th picture the ox and the man both gone out of sight
9th picture returning to the origin back to the source
10th picture entering the city with bliss-bestowing hands
end of meditation
note
Uncollected Poems (2006–2010)
Book of Days (2006) birth-day
godspeak: out of paradise
lucifer morning-star to man-kind after the fall: in like kind
man-kind: in image of
angelspeak
mother-tongue: the land of nod
mother-tongue: to the child just born
mother-tongue: after the child’s death
mother-tongue: after the flood
the rainbow bears witness
nineveh: waiting
mother-tongue: babylon
mother-tongue: to man-kind
godspeak
mother-tongue: we are dying
mother-tongue: in a dream before she died
sodom and gomorrah
prodigal
man-kind: over the jordan, into the promised land
lucifer morning-star
armageddon
man-kind: digging a trench to hell
godspeak: kingdom come
Last Poems & Drafts (2006–2010) 6/27/06 seventy (2008)
some points along some of the meridians (2007)
untitled (2006)
she leans out from the mirror (2006)
Titled (2006)
new orleans (2006)
after the children died she started bathing (2007)
haiku (2008)
An American Story (2008)
God Bless America (2008)
In the middle of the Eye (2010)
won’t you celebrate with me: the poetry of Lucille Clifton, by Kevin Young
Lucille Clifton Bibliography
Index of Poems
About the Co-Editors
About Lucille Clifton
Colophon
ma
mommy
grandma
lue
always light
Editors’ Note
This volume represents all the poems Lucille Clifton published in book form during her lifetime. It also includes groupings of previously uncollected poems placed in the book roughly when they were written: first, a selection of “Early Uncollected Poems” from the many Clifton wrote and kept but did not gather in her first full-length book, Good Times (1969); second, we have included a recently discovered typescript, “Book of Days,” that Clifton seems to have completed during 2006; and, finally, a grouping of “Last Poems & Drafts” that include late work and fragments, in various states of completion, found among her papers housed at Emory University. In all cases we have maintained the unique typography (and handwriting) found in her uncollected work.
We have not gathered here Clifton’s few occasional poems—with rare exceptions, sprinkled as “Uncollected Poems” throughout—nor any poems she published in magazines but left uncollected in book form during her lifetime. This volume also does not include her powerful memoir, Generations, which may still be found in Good Woman, the first of her selected poems. We also do not include her many works written for children. A bibliography at the back of the book reveals the breadth of her literary production.
In all, the Collected Poems offers readers a sense of Clifton’s poetic development from her earliest work to her last.
—Kevin Young & Michael S. Glaser
Foreword: Lucille Clifton
The love readers feel for Lucille Clifton—both the woman and her poetry—is constant and deeply felt. The lines that surface most frequently in praise of her work and her person are moving declarations of racial pride, courage, steadfastness or they are eloquent elegies for the vulnerable and the prematurely dead. She sifts the history of African Americans for honor:
like my aunt timmie.
it was her iron . . .
that smoothed the sheets
the master poet slept on . . .
She plumbs that history for justice:
loaded like spoons
into the belly of Jesus
where we lay for weeks for months
in the sweat and stink
of our own breathing . . .
can this tongue speak
can these bones walk
Grace Of God
Can this sin live
From humor to love to rage, Clifton’s poems elicit a visceral response. It would be difficult to forget the raucous delight of “wishes for sons”:
i wish them cramps.
i wish them a strange town
and the last tampon.
i wish them no 7-11 . . .
let them think they have accepted
arrogance in the universe,
then bring them to gynecologists
not unlike themselves.
And the wide love on display in “libation” demands our own:
i offer to this ground,
this gin.
i imagine an old man
crying here
out of the overseer’s sight,
pushing his tongue
through where a tooth
would be if he were whole.
the space aches
where his tooth would be,
where his land would be, his
house his wife his son
his beautiful daughter . . .
Can any one of us not shiver with the tenderness in “miss rosie”?
when I watch you
wrapped up like garbage
sitting, surrounded by the smell
of too old potato peels
or
when I watch you
in your old man’s shoes
with the little toe cut out
sitting, waiting for your mind
like next week’s grocery
i say
when I watch you
you wet brown bag of a woman
who used to be the best looking gal in georgia
used to be called the Georgia Rose
i stand up
through your destruction
i stand up.
There is no mistaking the rage in “the photograph: a lynching”:
is it the cut glass
of their eyes
looking up toward
the new gnarled branch
of the black man
hanging from a tree?
is it the white milk pleated
collar of the woman
smiling toward the camera,
her fingers loose around
a christian cross drooping
against her breast . . .
These are examples of the range and complexity of the emotions she forces us to confront. It is no wonder that her devoted fans speak often of how inspiring her poetry is—life-changing in some instances.
Accolades from fellow poets and critics refer to her universal human heart; they describe her as a fierce caring female. They compliment her courage, vision, joy—unadorned (meaning “simple”), mystical, poignant, humorous, intuitive, harsh and loving.
I do not disagree with these judgments. Yet I am startled by the silence in these interpretations of her work. There are no references to her intellect, imagination, scholarship or her risk-taking manipulation of language. To me she is not the big mama/big sister of racial reassurance and self-empowerment. I read her skill as that emanating from an astute, profound intellect—characteristics mostly absent from her reviews. The personal courage of the woman cannot be gainsaid, but it should not function as a substitute for piercing insight and bracing intelligence. My general impression of the best of her work: seductive with the simplicity of an atom, which is to say highly complex, explosive underneath an apparent quietude. The Lucifer poems alone belie this “down to earth” theme:
come coil with me
here in creation’s bed
among the twigs and ribbons
of the past. i have grown old
remembering this garden,
the hum of the great cats
moving into language, the sweet
fume of man’s rib
as it rose up and began to walk.
That line, “come coil with me” says everything you need to know about Lucifer and his conversation with God.
. . . let us rest here a time
like two old brothers
who watched it happen and wondered
what it meant.
This is no good/evil cliché. This revelation embraces dichotomy and reaches for an expression of our own ambivalent entanglements. Similarly in “lucifer speaks in his own voice”:
so am i certain of a
graceful bed
and a soft caress
along my long belly
at endtime . . .
i the only lucifer
light-bringer
created out of fire
illuminate i could
and so
illuminate i did
The touch, the view, is outside Milton or Dante. Clifton’s Lucifer is:
phallus and father
doing holy work . . .
if the angels
hear of this
there will be no peace
in heaven
Then there is the excellent “eve thinking.” Not the mute, seductive even corrupt Eve we are accustomed to. Clifton’s Eve thinks!
it is wild country here
brothers and sisters coupling
claw and wing . . .
i wait
while the clay two-foot
rumbles in his chest
searching for language to
call me
but he is slow
tonight as he sleeps
i will whisper into his mouth
our names.
The last lines of “adam thinking” hit us with its sheer originality:
this creation is so fierce
i would rather have been born
I crave a book of criticism on Lucille Clifton’s work that scours it for the meanings therein and the stone-eyed intellect on display.
I edited a book by Lucille. Generations. The only prose, I believe, she ever wrote for publication. I was so pleased to be working with her because, although we knew each other briefly at Howard University, I had not seen her since then. The manuscript was impressive—honest, clear-eyed with a shapeliness natural to poets. During one of our conversations in my office she told me that she spoke fairly regularly to her deceased mother. “Really? How?” I asked. “Prayer?” “No,” she said. “Ouija Board.” I smiled, not with condescension, I hope, but with fascination. “What does she say?” “Many things,” she answered, “though she has no sense of time. She speaks of things past as though they were in the future. As in ‘you are going to have two beautiful daughters.’ I tell her I already have beautiful daughters.”
Lucille continued, “But I get the impression she isn’t very interested in me. Once I asked her about something extremely important to me and she said, ‘Excuse me, I have to go. I have something to do.’”
Something to do? I was mesmerized. The dead have active, curious, busy existences? Lucille assured me it seemed to be so. I was happy beyond belief to contemplate the afterlife that way. Not some static hymnal-singing, self-aggrandizing chorus, nor blank preconsciousness—but life otherwise.
Since that conversation it occurred to me what was so fetching about Generations: in addition to possessing the ease and intimacy of Clifton’s poetry, it speaks to, for, and from fictional and posthumous lives—Moses, Medgar Evers, Amazons, Bob Marley, Sleeping Beauty, etc. She is comfortable and knowing about the dead.
Perhaps I should dwell more on her famous, self-affirming
won’t you celebrate with me
what I have shaped into
a kind of life? . . .
Perhaps. But it is “in the evenings” that freezes my attention; it is “what did she know . . . ,” “aunt jemima,” “horse prayer,” and others that tell us everything we need to know, streamlined and perfect.
the air
you have polluted
you will breathe
the waters
<
br /> you have poisoned
you will drink
when you come again
and you will come again
the air
you have polluted
you will breathe
the waters
you have poisoned
you will drink
Lucille is another word for light, which is the soul of “enlightenment.” And she knew it.
—Toni Morrison
Early Uncollected Poems
(1965–1969)
BLACK WOMEN
America made us heroines
not wives,
we learned the tricks
to keep the race together
but had to leave our men
to find themselves
and now they damn
what they cannot forgive.
Even ol massas son
lives in a dream
remembering the lie
we made him love.
America made us heroines
not wives.
We hid our ladyness
to save our lives
OLD HUNDRED
NOW LET US MAKE
nobody knows
A JOYFUL NOISE
under the cry
LET US SHOUT
under the glistening
HALLELUJAH
sleeps goodby
AND LET US MAKE
God is a friend
A JOYFUL NOISE
standing between
UNTO THE LORD