LUCILLE CLIFTON

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.

People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry, and that's a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated.

They act like they don’t love their country No, what is it is they found out their country don’t love them

I don't go get a poem. It calls me and I accept it.

What they call you is one thing. What you answer to is something else.

the lost women I need to know their names those women I would have walked with, jauntily the way men go in groups swinging their arms, and the ones those sweating women whom I would have joined After a hard game to chew the fat what would we have called each other laughing joking into our beer? where are my gangs, my teams, my mislaid sisters? all the women who could have known me, where in the world are their names?

may you kiss the wind then turn from it certain that it will love your back

they ask me to remember but they want me to remember their memories and I keep on remembering mine

All people, even one's own children, come with baggage. When they're little, you have to help them carry it. But when they grow up, you have to do that difficult thing of setting their baggage down and taking up your own again.

I am running into a new year and the old years blow back like a wind that I catch in my hair like strong fingers like all my old promises and it will be hard to let go of what I said to myself about myself when I was sixteen and twenty-six and thirty-six but I am running into a new year and I beg what i love and I leave to forgive me.

wishes for sons by Lucille Clifton i wish them cramps. i wish them a strange town and the last tampon. I wish them no 7-11. i wish them one week early and wearing a white skirt. i wish them one week late. later i wish them hot flashes and clots like you wouldn't believe. let the flashes come when they meet someone special. let the clots come when they want to. let them think they have accepted arrogance in the universe, then bring them to gynecologists not unlike themselves.

Even when the universe made it quite clear to me that I was mistaken in my certainties ... I did not break. The shattering of my sureties did not shatter me.

If i should enter the house and speak with my own voice, at last, about its awful furnitutre, pulling apart the covering over the dusty bodies; the randy father, the husband holding ice in his hand like a blessing, the mother bleeding into herself and the small imploding girl, i say if i should walk into that web, who will come flying after me, leaping tall buildings? you?

I do not feel inhibited or bound by what I am. That does not mean that I have never had bad scenes relating to being Black and/or a woman, it means that other people’s craziness has not managed to make me crazy.

won't you celebrate with me what i have shaped into a kind of life? i had no model. born in babylon both nonwhite and woman what did i see to be except myself? i made it up here on this bridge between starshine and clay, my one hand holding tight my other hand; come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.

The end of a thing, is never the end, something is always being born like a year of a baby.

Every pair of eyes facing you has probably experienced something you could not endure.

Tell the truth... maybe just to see clearly, as clearly as possible.

We cannot create what we can't imagine.

Poems come out of wonder, not out of knowing.

In the bigger scheme of things the universe is not asking us to do something, the universe is asking us to be something. And that's a whole different thing.

Say it clear, and it will be beautiful.

You might as well answer the door, my child, the truth is furiously knocking.

these hips have never been enslaved, they go where they want to go they do what they want to do. these hips are mighty hips. these hips are magic hips

blessing the boats (at saint mary’s) may the tide that is entering even now the lip of our understanding carry you out beyond the face of fear may you kiss the wind then turn from it certain that it will love your back may you open your eyes to water water waving forever and may you in your innocence sail through this to that