The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010

by Lucille Clifton

  what I’ve been told

  AMEN and the trouble I’ve seen.

  THE OLD AVAILABLES HAVE

  the old availables have locked the door.

  goodby to friday open house

  nobody enters friday anymore

  the old availables have locked the door

  goodby to chocolate open house

  nobody enters friday anymore.

  some of us are tired

  and all of us a

  all of us are tired

  and some of us are mad

  CHAN’S DREAM

  When I was born

  the red baby lions were asleep.

  When I was born

  they were dreaming in my body bed

  and then the American Cowboy

  saw where I was borning

  and shot me

  and the little red lions ran growling

  kill the cowboy

  kill the cowboy

  kill the cowboy

  from Dark Nursery Rhymes for a Dark Daughter

  I

  Flesh-colored bandage

  and other schemes

  will slippery into

  all your dreams

  and make you grumble

  in the night,

  wanting the world to be

  pink and light.

  Wherever you go,

  whatever you do,

  flesh-colored bandage

  is after you.

  III

  Beware the terrible tricky three;

  Blondy and Beauty and Fantasy.

  Together they capture little girls

  and push them into little worlds.

  They might have had fun

  if they had run

  the first time that they heard them hiss

  “Promises promises promissesss.”

  IV

  Ten feet tall

  or giant arm,

  nobody has

  your sunshine charm.

  5/23/67

  R.I.P.

  The house that is on fire

  pieces all across the sky

  make the moon look like

  a yellow man in a veil

  watching the troubled people

  running and crying

  Oh who gone remember now like it was,

  Langston gone.

  ONLY TOO HIGH IS HIGH ENOUGH

  for Charlie Parker

  probably even Icarus, plummeting from

  an impossible height

  was proud

  a man beset by feathers

  wearing bird colors

  hearing bird conversations plain

  sharing bird ambitions

  flying above the possibilities

  pursuing with immortals

  the pride of wings

  THE COMING OF X

  Disillusioned by bad dreams

  and a country bent on evening

  the dusky girls and brothers have

  noticed the prevalence of black

  bark bird berry and

  raised their feral shadows till

  they walk like men to the slaughterhouse.

  Conversation Overheard in a Graveyard

  Harriet:

  This place has made us heroines

  not wives

  and kept us from its sparkles and

  its paints

  and made us dull in natural disguise.

  Sojourner:

  We’ve lost our ladyhood

  but saved our lives.

  Harriet:

  What mirror will remember you and me

  suckling strangers and sons?

  Sojourner:

  History.

  SUNDAY DINNER

  One wants

  in a fantastic time

  the certainty of

  chicken popping in grease

  the truth of potatoes

  steaming the panes and

  butter

  gold and predictable as

  heroes in history

  melting over all.

  MY FRIEND MARY STONE FROM OXFORD MISSISSIPPI

  We know we ought to be enemies,

  her voice perhaps,

  thirty three years off the Delta and

  still caked in mud or

  my hair perhaps,

  bushed for the warrior women of Dahomey,

  we know we ought to be enemies, only

  Oh Mr. Faulkner

  to prevail is such an awe full responsibility

  to “have a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and

  endurance”

  is an awe full responsibility but

  we know we have to try it and

  we are both trying to try it

  we

  red as the clay hills and blacker than loam

  friends.

  SPRING THOUGHT FOR THELMA

  Someone who had her fingers

  set for growing,

  settles into garden.

  If old desires linger

  she will be going

  flower soon. Pardon

  her little blooms

  whose blossoming was stunted

  by rooms.

  my mother teached me

  and my father preached me

  what is love.

  there is no more to know.

  except

  as I lay quiet

  cold as a rained on sidewalk

  after my daughter’s father

  has teached me

  and preached me

  I can hear off in the nigger streets

  laughing and cursing and

  something like a cry

  To Mama too late

  The lady who is gone

  had forgot all about

  I love you.

  If I had fastened it someplace

  on to her midnight pillow

  I might be able to say goodnight

  and she might not be asleep.

  Dear Mama,

  here are the poems

  you never wrote

  here are the plants

  you never grew,

  all that i am

  i am for him

  all that i do

  i do for you.

  Dear

  I have sent you your box

  as promised

  and hope you like it all

  I put in tuna fish because

  you like it keep

  your room clean (smile) and

  we are all alright only

  I misses you so much

  my baby

  don’t fall in love with no

  stranger

  write when you have time and

  be a good girl for your

  Mama

  Dear

  it was a nice day today

  Hills is pretty this time of year

  though maybe not like D.C.

  Everybody been so nice to me

  since you been gone

  Everybody say they will pray for you

  to get good grades and

  everything

  I will close now as I am tired

  write when you get time we

  buried your uncle this morning

  and

  be a good girl

  Mama

  plain as a baby

  my Mama would sit

  in the chair by the window

  (where she started dying)

  and watch the weekends

  awe full as China

  and hum

  Take my hand

  Take my hand.

  Oh Precious Lord

  my Mama sang

  Everytime i talk about

  the old folks

  tomming and easying their way

  happy with their nothing and

  grateful for their sometime

  i run up against my old black

  Mama

  and i shut up and stand there

  shamed.

  satchmo

  he di
sremembers why he started grinning

  this old great one

  standing behind his cornet.

  something to do with

  new orleans as a girl

  and the old men following death down rampart street.

  he disremembers why, only now

  always he comes with music

  and with grinning

  and we are glad

  we swing with this old great one

  who has something to do with life

  grinning at love and death.

  FOR PRISSLY

  girl

  looking like a wild thing

  if you keep on your loving way

  if you don’t stop caring and fearing

  and noticing things

  and understanding things

  people gone call you crazy

  the last Seminole is black

  and rolls his own in a john

  bargaining with his brain

  for a reef of peace

  smoking his way across the reservations

  into a high and splendid

  land of grass

  nodding and smiling to hear the drums begin

  and all the mighty nations celebrating

  the endless littlebighorns

  in his mind

  a poem written for many moynihans

  ignoring me

  you turn into blind alleys

  follow them around

  to your boyhouse

  meet your mother

  green in her garden

  kiss what she holds out to you

  her widowed arm and

  this is betterness

  ignoring me

  you make a brother for you

  she drops him in the pattern

  you made when you were sonning

  you name her wife to keep her

  and this is betterness

  ignoring me

  your days slide into seasons

  you build a hole to fall in

  and send your brother running

  following blind alleys

  turning white as winter

  and this is

  betterness

  the poet is thirty two

  she has such knowledges as

  rats have,

  the sound of cat

  the smell of cheese

  where the holes are,

  she is comfortable

  hugging the walls

  she trembles over herself

  in the light

  and she will leave disaster

  when she can.

  QUOTATIONS FROM AUNT MARGARET BROWN

  Abraham Lincoln

  just like my Daddy;

  dead.

  White men

  just walking all on the moon,

  he go where he want to go.

  Talk about Columbus,

  I tell you who discovered

  America;

  Martin Luther King

  that’s who.

  daddy

  you whole old hoodoo man

  you always knew everything

  like when you said

  them old white people

  they don’t mean you no good

  and even

  the time the light-skinned jimmy came by

  and you looked at his three-button roll

  and said

  here’s this nigger i don’t like

  take somebody like me

  who Daddy took to sunday school

  and who was a member of the choir

  and helped with the little kids at

  the church picnic,

  deep into Love thy Neighbor take

  somebody like me

  who cried at the March on Washington

  and thought Pennsylvania was beautiful

  let her read a lot

  let her notice things

  then

  hit her with the Draft Riots and the

  burning of the colored orphan asylum

  and the children in the church and

  the Lamar busses and

  the assassinations and the

  bombs and all the spittings on our

  children and

  these beasts were not niggers

  these beasts were not niggers

  she

  will be too old to change and

  she will not hate consistently or long

  and she will know herself a coward and

  a fool.

  let them say

  that she had going for her

  a good ass and six children.

  that she obeyed her daddy

  and her husband

  and looked just like her mama

  more and more.

  that she thought god was

  a good idea.

  that she cried when she saw

  she wasn’t beautiful

  and tried to be real nice.

  good times

  (1969)

  for mama

  in the inner city

  or

  like we call it

  home

  we think a lot about uptown

  and the silent nights

  and the houses straight as

  dead men

  and the pastel lights

  and we hang on to our no place

  happy to be alive

  and in the inner city

  or

  like we call it

  home

  my mama moved among the days

  like a dreamwalker in a field;

  seemed like what she touched was hers

  seemed like what touched her couldn’t hold,

  she got us almost through the high grass

  then seemed like she turned around and ran

  right back in

  right back on in

  my daddy’s fingers move among the couplers

  chipping steel and skin

  and if the steel would break

  my daddy’s fingers might be men again.

  my daddy’s fingers wait

  grotesque as monkey wrenches

  wide and full of angles like the couplers

  to chip away the mold’s imperfections.

  but what do my daddy’s fingers

  know about grace?

  what do the couplers know

  about being locked together?

  lane is the pretty one

  her veins run mogen david

  and her mind just runs.

  the best looking colored girl in town

  whose eyes are real light brown

  frowns into her glass;

  I wish I’d stayed in class.

  i wish those lovers

  had not looked over

  your crooked nose

  your too wide mouth

  dear sister

  dear sister love

  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

  robert

  was born obedient

  without questions

  did a dance called

  picking grapes

  sticking his butt out

  for pennies

  married a master

  who whipped his mind

  until he died

  until he died

  the color of his life

  was nigger

  the 1st

  wh
at i remember about that day

  is boxes stacked across the walk

  and couch springs curling through the air

  and drawers and tables balanced on the curb

  and us, hollering,

  leaping up and around

  happy to have a playground;

  nothing about the emptied rooms

  nothing about the emptied family

  running across to the lot

  in the middle of the cement days

  to watch the big boys trembling

  as the dice made poets of them

  if we remembered to despair

  i forget

  i forget

  while the streetlights were blooming

  and the sharp birdcall

  of the iceman and his son

  and the ointment of the ragman’s horse

  sang spring

  our fathers were dead and

  our brothers were dying

  still

  it was nice

  when the scissors man come round

  running his wheel

  rolling his wheel

  and the sparks shooting