Lucille Clifton: “The Poet and the Terrible Stories She Could Tell”
I introduced my students to her verses a week ago, showing how it takes a black woman poet to transform the genre of confessional poetry from the tiresome angst and agony of the head-in-the-oven set to the lyrical poetics of surviving this onslaught we call life.
won’t you celebrate with me
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 one hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.
Interestingly, I had not know her work until a few years ago, and it took a gay black man to introduce her work to me. I have passed her words down to a class filled with white faces, who, upon reading her words, also felt a shift of recognition.
I had planned to take a car-load of those students to hear her read a week from tonight in a nearby city, which I guess is a kind of thing a teacher does. But really it was to be a hajj for me to see and hear a woman I deeply admire. I wished to bear witness.
She’s dead now as of Saturday. She has left me at a time I found that I need her the most, but I just can’t be too sad about it because, I honestly imagine that she would not want me to be. Lucky for me, I spent the next day after hearing the news wrapped in a cocoon of new and old friends who reminded me where I have chosen to place my faith and what it is I do believe in: LOVE.
