Lucille Clifton’s poems are known for their simplicity, strength, and deep emotional honesty. She often wrote about identity, womanhood, family, and the Black experience in America. Her language is spare but powerful — every word carries weight. Clifton celebrated survival and self-love, especially as a Black woman facing hardship and history. Many of her poems confront pain, racism, and loss with grace and resilience. She often used her own body and life as symbols of endurance and hope. Through her poetry, Clifton reminds readers of the beauty in persistence and the sacred power of being alive.
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| lucille clifton |
1994
By Lucille Clifton
i was leaving my fifty-eighth year
when a thumb of ice
stamped itself hard near my heart
you have your own story
you know about the fears the tears
the scar of disbelief
you know that the saddest lies
are the ones we tell ourselves
you know how dangerous it is
to be born with breasts
you know how dangerous it is
to wear dark skin
i was leaving my fifty-eighth year
when i woke into the winter
of a cold and mortal body
thin icicles hanging off
the one mad nipple weeping
have we not been good children
did we not inherit the earth
but you must know all about this
from your own shivering life
cutting greens
curling them around
i hold their bodies in obscene embrace
thinking of everything but kinship.
collards and kale
strain against each strange other
away from my kissmaking hand and
the iron bedpot.
the pot is black,
the cutting board is black,
my hand,
and just for a minute
the greens roll black under the knife,
and the kitchen twists dark on its spine
and I taste in my natural appetite
the bond of live things everywhere.
the garden of delight
By Lucille Clifton
for some
it is stone
bare smooth
as a buttock
rounding
into the crevasse
of the world
for some
it is extravagant
water mouths wide
washing together
forever for some
it is fire
for some air
and for some
certain only of the syllables
it is the element they
search their lives for
eden
for them
it is a test
john
somebody coming in blackness
like a star
and the world be a great bush
on his head
and his eyes be fire
in the city
and his mouth be true as time
he be calling the people brother
even in the prison
even in the jail
i’m just only a baptist preacher
somebody bigger than me coming
in blackness like a star
the earth is a living thing
is a black shambling bear
ruffling its wild back and tossing
mountains into the sea
is a black hawk circling
the burying ground circling the bones
picked clean and discarded
is a fish black blind in the belly of water
is a diamond blind in the black belly of coal
is a black and living thing
is a favorite child
of the universe
feel her rolling her hand
in its kinky hair
feel her brushing it clean
sisters
me and you be sisters.
we be the same.
me and you
coming from the same place.
me and you
be greasing our legs
touching up our edges.
me and you
be scared of rats
be stepping on roaches.
me and you
come running high down purdy street one time
and mama laugh and shake her head at
me and you.
me and you
got babies
got thirty-five
got black
let our hair go back
be loving ourselves
be loving ourselves
be sisters.
only where you sing,
I poet.
