Lucille Clifton Poems
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Lucille Clifton Poems (Careful Selections for Education)

Western New York served as the starting point for the life and work of children’s book author, poet, and educator Lucille Clifton (1936–2010). Here are Lucille Clifton poems that are only a small sample of her vast body of work.

Lucille Clifton Poems

The subject of Clifton’s well-regarded poetry includes societal concerns, the African-American experience, and feminine identity. Her poetry has received accolades for its deft use of powerful imagery and lines that even give the word space value.

The deliberate absence of punctuation and capitalization may identify her poems.

Lucille Clifton Poems

Elizabeth Alexander, a poet, praises Clifton for using powerful language in her poetry, which was frequently succinct and sparse. According to Robin Becker of The American Poetry Review, Clifton places a strong emphasis on the morality and human aspect of her poetry, which is stressed by the use of poor language.

Clifton committed his life to telling the traumatic experience of African-Americans. She also addressed subjects pertaining to women’s difficulties, regular family struggles, and health while expressing concepts of beauty and bravery.

Read  Lucille Clifton Poems here.

Homage to My Hips

The poet and Pulitzer Prize winner of Lucille Clifton poems was a prominent figure in the feminist and civil rights movements. Her speaker adopts a powerful attitude toward her body in “Honor to My Hips,” expressing love and admiration for her “large hips” and their strength.

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In the thirteen poetry collections Clifton published throughout her lifetime, “homage to my hips” is one of the most well-known pieces.

These hips are big hips
They need space to move around in.
They don’t fit into little
Petty places. These hips
Are free hips.
They don’t like to be held back.
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.
I have known them
To put a spell on a man and
Spin him like a top!

The speaker of this brief poem by Clifton describes her “large hips” in simple, plain language throughout. They neither make her seem like the ladies whom society has judged lovely nor do they fit in little spaces.

They are yet strong and belong to her. Her hips deserve no less given the way she conducts herself. The speaker of the poem describes how many men she has spun around at the end.

The Lost Baby Poem

The fact that she refers to herself as “lost” creates the sense that she either did it accidentally or was unaware of what she was doing. She describes what happened in the opening verse in a harsh manner, employing strong language.

She refers to “dumping the baby into the waves,” as though at the time she considered it to be something she had to get rid of, something without any worth flowing “with the sewage.” Then she treats drowning and being drowned as though they were murders.

The time i dropped your almost body down
Down to meet the waters under the city
And run one with the sewage to the sea
What did i know about waters rushing back
What did i know about drowning
Or being drowned

You would have been born into winter
In the year of the disconnected gas
And no car we would have made the thin
Walk over genesee hill into the canada wind
To watch you slip like ice into strangers’ hands
You would have fallen naked as snow into winter
If you were here I could tell you these
And some other things

If i am ever less than a mountain
For your definite brothers and sisters
Let the rivers pour over my head
Let the sea take me for a spiller
Of seas let black men call me stranger
Always for your never named sake

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1994

Her writing stresses perseverance and courage in the face of difficulty, with a special emphasis on the African-American experience and family life. Clifton was a prolific and well-respected poet.

Clifton taught literature and creative writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz, from 1985 to 1989. She held the title of Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Maryland’s St. Mary’s College.

She served as a visiting professor at Columbia University from 1995 to 1999.

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

Two Poems

Lucille Clifton Poems

Lucille Clifton, who was born under the sign of Cancer, came to Langston Hughes’ attention in 1970 after appearing in his anthology Poetry of the Negro.

She has released many poetry and autobiographical books. She was married, and she and her spouse had six kids.

Many of Clifton’s poems, including the one I’m examining right now, were especially about Eve and frequently employed Old Testament religious imagery. Feminist and environmental perspectives are simple to apply while reading her poems.

Adam Thinking

She
Stolen from my bone
Is it any wonder
I hunger to tunnel back
Inside desperate
To reconnect the rib and clay
And to be whole again

Some need is in me
Struggling to roar through my
Mouth into a name
This creation is so fierce
I would rather have been born

Eve Thinking

It is wild country here
Brothers and sisters coupling
Claw and wing
Groping one another

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

My Dream About Being White

My Dream About Being White is one of Lucille Clifton poems that can be found in The Collected Lucille Clifton poems from 1965 to 2010. One of the most respected African American poets is Lucille Clifton.

The full 17-line stanza of Clifton’s poem “My Dream About Being White” makes up this section. One to six syllables make into each line, indicating that they are all rather brief.

The word “white” appears three times throughout the poem as its title is “My Dream About Being White.” For what looks to be an intriguing and serious subject, the tone is quite light.

Although anybody might be the speaker, we presume it to be the poet. I’m wearing white history, but there is no future for me in those garments, so I take them off and wake up dancing, the speaker of the poem says (Lines 11-17).

In lines 9–10, she introduces herself as “hello white me” and claims that while she is wearing white history, there is no future in that, therefore she becomes herself once more and seems to dance joyfully.

Hey music and me
Only white,
Hair a flutter of fall leaves
Circling my perfect line of a nose,
No lips,
No behind,
Hey white me
And I’m wearing white history
But there’s no future in those clothes
So i take them off and wake up dancing.

I get the impression from this that she is proud of being a powerful African American woman. She doesn’t have to be white, despite what she claims. “My Dream About Being White” is the title.

Thus, the speaker had a dream in which she was of a Caucasian race, and that when she awoke, she realized she was content with who she was and danced joyfully.

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The speaker is experiencing her dream in which she is white in the first part of the poem. She has a lovely nose, but no lips or behind, and her hair is “a flutter of fall leaves” (lines 3–4). I admire how the poem is written so simply but with such profundity.

Sorrow Song

Lucille Clifton Poems

My coworkers and I thought you would enjoy some companionship during these tough days of social withdrawal, self-isolation, and quarantines, days fraught with fear and worry.

We shall thus present you to poets we have encountered throughout the years each day. They will only spread “the best words in the best sequence,” which will cause you to experience a certain amount of delight, thought, and meditation. Enjoy.

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.

Wishes for Sons

To put it mildly, Clifton writes poetry that is aggressive. “Wishes for Sons,” one of her more potent poems, illustrates the everyday responsibilities of females that are all too frequently misunderstood or perhaps unknown to males.

Although she says, “I wish them cramping,” it’s symbolic (Clifton “wishes for sons” 1).

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.

The Garden of Delight

According to this poetry, the four elements may be present in the “garden of joy,” which is a metaphor for both Eden and the planet in general. It may be stone, which is portrayed as a naked buttock in this poetry. Perhaps water is fiercely slapping open jaws. The two options are fire or air.

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

Lucille’s refusal to feature ambiguities in her poems that casts on her that most-read-must-read spotlight. Everything, is achievable even in the midst of destruction. Another pathos-filled poetry in this anthology which had caught a lot of attention will be featured in our next publication.

Meanwhile, ensure you share this in your  poetry community as it bears a lot of controversial topics to be discussed: and even prettier is, to be discussed in the most creative way- poetry.

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