she could see the peril of an
unexamined life.
she closed her eyes, afraid to look for her
authenticity
but the light insists on itself in the world;
a voice from the nondead past started talking,
she closed her ears and it spelled out in her hand
“ you might as well answer the door, my child,
the truth is furiously knocking.”
the light that came to lucille clifton
testament
in the beginning
was the word.
the year of our lord,
amen. i
lucille clifton
hereby testify
that in that room
there was a light
and in that light
there was a voice
and in that voice
there was a sigh
and in that sigh
there was a world.
a world a sigh a voice a light and
i
alone
in a room.
incandescence
formless form
and the soft
shuffle of sound
who are these strangers
peopleing this light?
lucille
we are
the Light
mother, i am mad.
we should have guessed
a twelve-fingered flower
might break. my knowing
flutters to the ground.
mother i have managed to unlearn
my lessons. i am left
in otherness. mother
someone calling itself Light
has opened my inside.
i am flooded with brilliance
mother,
someone of it is answering to
your name.
perhaps
i am going blind.
my eyes exploding,
seeing more than is there
until they burst into nothing
or going deaf, these sounds
the feathered hum of silence
or going away from my self, the cool
fingers of lace on my skin
the fingers of madness
or perhaps
in the palace of time
our lives are a circular stair
and i am turning
explanations
anonymous water can slide under the ground.
the wind can shiver with desire.
this room can settle.
this body can settle.
but can such a sound
cool as a circle
surround and
pray
or promise
or prophesy?
friends come
explaining to me that my mind
is the obvious assassin
the terrorist of voices
who has waited
to tell me miraculous lies
all my life. no
i say
friends
the ones who talk to me
their words thin as wire
their chorus fine as crystal
their truth direct as stone,
they are present as air.
they are there.
to joan
joan
did you never hear
in the soft rushes of france
merely the whisper of french grass
rubbing against leathern
sounding now like a windsong
now like a man?
did you never wonder
oh fantastical joan,
did you never cry in the sun’s face
unreal unreal? did you never run
villageward
hands pushed out toward your apron?
and just as you knew that your mystery
was broken for all time
did they not fall then
soft as always
into your ear
calling themselves michael
among beloved others?
and you
did you not then sigh
my voices my voices of course?
confession
father
i am not equal to the faith required.
i doubt.
i have a woman’s certainties;
bodies pulled from me,
pushed into me.
bone flesh is what i know.
father
the angels say they have no wings.
i woke one morning
feeling how to see them.
i could discern their shadows
in the shadow. i am not
equal to the faith required.
father
i see your mother standing now
shoulderless and shoeless by your side.
i hear her whisper truths i cannot know.
father i doubt.
father
what are the actual certainties?
your mother speaks of love.
the angels say they have no wings.
i am not equal to the faith required.
i try to run from such surprising presence;
the angels stream before me
like a torch.
in populated air
our ancestors continue.
i have seen them.
i have heard
their shimmering voices
singing.
Next
(1987)
This one or that one dies but never the singer . . . one singer falls but the next steps into the empty place and sings . . .
“December Day in Honolulu”
Galway Kinnell
we are all next
album
for lucille chan hall
1 it is 1939.
our mothers are turning our hair
around rags.
our mothers
have filled our shirley temple cups.
we drink it all.
2 1939 again.
our shirley temple curls.
shirley yellow.
shirley black.
our colors are fading.
later we had to learn ourselves
back across 2 oceans
into bound feet and nappy hair.
3 1958 and 9.
we have dropped daughters,
afrikan and chinese.
we think
they will be beautiful.
we think
they will become themselves.
4 it is 1985.
she is.
she is.
they are.
winnie song
a dark wind is blowing
the townships into town.
they have burned your house
winnie mandela
but your house has been on fire
a hundred years.
they have locked your husband
in a cage
and it has made him free.
Mandela. Mandala. Mandala
is the universe. the universe
is burning. a dark wind is blowing
the homelands into home.
there
there in the homelands
they are arresting children.
they are beating children
and shooting children.
in jo’burg
a woman sits on her veranda.
watching her child.
her child is playing on their lawn.
her man comes home from
arresting children. she smiles.
she offers him a drink.
each morning i practice for
getting that woman.
when her sister calls me sister
i remind myself
she is there.
what spells raccoon to me
spells more than just his
bandit’s eyes
squinting as his furry woman
hunkers down among the fists
of berries.
oh coon
which gave my grandfather a name
and fed his wife on more then one
occasion
i can no more change my references
than they can theirs.
this belief
in the magic of whiteness,
that it is the smooth
pebble in your hand,
that it is the godmother’s
best gift,
that it explains,
allows,
assures,
entitles,
that it can sprout singular blossoms
like jack’s bean
and singular verandas from which
to watch them rise,
it is a spell
winding round on itself,
grimms’ awful fable,
and it turns into capetown and johannesburg
as surely as the beanstalk leads
to the giant’s actual country
where jack lies broken at the
meadow’s edge
and the land is in ruins,
no magic, no anything.
why some people be mad at me sometimes
they ask me to remember
but they want me to remember
their memories
and i keep on remembering
mine.
sorrow song
for the eyes of the children,
the last to melt,
the last to vaporize,
for the lingering
eyes of the children, staring,
the eyes of the children of
buchenwald,
of viet nam and johannesburg,
for the eyes of the children
of nagasaki,
for the eyes of the children
of middle passage,
for cherokee eyes, ethiopian eyes,
russian eyes, american eyes,
for all that remains of the children,
their eyes,
staring at us, amazed to see
the extraordinary evil in
ordinary men.
I. at creation
and i and my body rise
with the dusky beasts
with eve and her brother
to gasp in
the insubstantial air
and evenly begin the long
slide out of paradise.
all life is life.
all clay is kin and kin.
I. at gettysburg
if, as they say, this is somehow about myself,
this clash of kin across good farmland, then
why are the ghosts of the brothers and cousins
rising and wailing toward me in their bloody voices,
who are you, nigger woman, who are you?
I. at nagasaki
in their own order
the things of my world
glisten into ash. i
have done nothing
to deserve this,
only been to the silver birds
what they have made me.
nothing.
I. at jonestown
on a day when i would have believed
anything, i believed that this white man,
stern as my father, neutral in his coupling
as adam, was possibly who he insisted he was.
now he has brought me to the middle of the
jungle of my life. if i have been wrong, again,
father may even this cup in my hand turn against me.
them bones
them bones will
rise again
them bones
them bones will
walk again
them bones
them bones will
talk again
now hear
the word of The Lord
—Traditional
atlantic is a sea of bones,
my bones,
my elegant afrikans
connecting whydah and new york,
a bridge of ivory.
seabed they call it.
in its arms my early mothers sleep.
some women leapt with babies in their arms.
some women wept and threw the babies in.
maternal armies pace the atlantic floor.
i call my name into the roar of surf
and something awful answers.
cruelty. don’t talk to me about cruelty
or what I am capable of.
when i wanted the roaches dead i wanted them dead
and i killed them. i took a broom to their country
and smashed and sliced without warning
without stopping and i smiled all the time i was doing it.
it was a holocaust of roaches, bodies,
parts of bodies, red all over the ground.
i didn’t ask their names.
they had no names worth knowing.
now i watch myself whenever i enter a room.
i never know what i might do.
the woman in the camp
cbs news
lebanon
1983
they murdered
27 of my family
counting the babies
in the wombs.
some of the men
spilled seed on the ground.
how much is a thousand
thousand?
i had a child.
i taught her to love.
i should have taught her
to fear.
i have learned about blood
and bullets,
where is the love
in my education?
a woman in this camp
has 1 breast and 2 babies.
a woman in this camp
has breasts like mine.
a woman in this camp
watched the stealing
of her husband.
a woman in this camp
has eyes like mine.
alive
i never thought of other women.
if i am ever alive again
i will hold out my female hands.
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?
4 daughters
i am the sieve she strains from
little by little
everyday.
i am the rind
she is discarding.
i am the riddle
she is trying to answer.
something is moving
in the water.
she is the hook.
i am the line.
grown daughter
someone is helping me with onions
who peels in the opposite direction
without tears and promises
different soup. i sit with her
watching her learning to love her but
who is she who is she who
here is another bone to pick with you
o mother whose bones I worry for scraps,
nobody warned me about daughters;
how they bewitch you into believing
you have thrown off a pot that is yourself
then one night you creep into their rooms and
their faces have hardened into odd flowers
their voices are choosing in foreign elections and
their legs are open to strange unwieldy men.
female
&n
bsp; there is an amazon in us.
she is the secret we do not
have to learn.
the strength that opens us
beyond ourselves.
birth is our birthright.
we smile our mysterious smile.
if our grandchild be a girl
i wish for her
fantastic hands,
twelve spiky fingers
symbols of our tribe.
she will do magic
with them,
she will turn personal
abracadabra
remembered from
dahomean women
wearing
extravagant gloves.
this is the tale
i keep on telling
trying to get it right;
the feast of women,
the feeding and
being fed.
my dream about being white
hey music and
me
only white,
hair a flutter of
fall leaves
circling my perfect