The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 Read online

  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