for maude

for maude
what i am forgetting doubles everyday
what i am remembering
is you     is us aging
though you called me girl
i can feel us       white haired
nappy and not
listening to marvin
both of us wondering
whats going on        all of us
wondering       oh darlin girl
what   what   what
~Lucille Clifton, Voices

Poetess Lucille Clifton (RIPP)

memoryask me to tell how it feels
remembering your mother's face
turned to water under the white words
of the man at the shoe store.

ask me,
though she tells it better than i do,
not because of her charm
but because it never happened
she says,
no bully salesman swaggering,
no rage, no shame, none of it
ever happened.
i only remember buying you
your first grown up shoes

she smiles.

ask me

how it feels.

~Lucille Clifton (June 27, 1936 – February 13, 2010)

trackback rootz

"roots"

call it our craziness even,
call it anything.
it is the life thing in us
that will not let us die.
even in death’s hand
we fold the fingers up
and call them greens
and grow on them,
we hum them and make music.
call it our wildness then,
we are lost from the field
of flowers, we become
a field of flowers.
call it our craziness
our wildness

call it our roots,
it is the light in us
it is the light of us
it is the light,
call it
whatever you have to,
call it anything.


Lucille Clifton

good woman: poems and a memoir 1969-1980
Brockport, New York: BOA Editions, 1987. 120