Lucille Clifton Quotes

You might as well answer the door, my child, the truth is furiously knocking.

may you kiss the wind then turn from it certain that it will love your back

the lesson of the falling leaves the leaves believe such letting go is love such love is faith such faith is grace such grace is god i agree with the leaves

What they call you is one thing. What you answer to is something else.

they ask me to remember but they want me to remember their memories and I keep on remembering mine

don’t write out of what I know; I write out of what I wonder. I think most artists create art in order to explore, not to give the answers. Poetry and art are not about answers to me; they are about questions.

Every pair of eyes facing you has probably experienced something you could not endure.

I am running into a new year and the old years blow back like a wind that I catch in my hair like strong fingers like all my old promises and it will be hard to let go of what I said to myself about myself when I was sixteen and twenty-six and thirty-six but I am running into a new year and I beg what i love and I leave to forgive me.

listen, you a wonder. you a city of a woman. you got a geography of your own. listen, somebody need a map to understand you. somebody need directions to move around you. listen, woman, you not a noplace anonymous girl; mister with his hands on you he got his hands on some damn body!

We cannot create what we can't imagine.

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 other hand; come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.

Come celebrate with me that every day something has tried to kill me and has failed.

People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry, and that's a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated.

I come to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.

I do not feel inhibited or bound by what I am. That does not mean that I have never had bad scenes relating to being Black and/or a woman, it means that other people’s craziness has not managed to make me crazy.

You are the one I am lit for. Come with your rod that twists and is a serpent. I am the bush. I am burning I am not consumed.

they will empty your eyes of everything you love

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?

so many languages have fallen off the edge of the world

I am a black woman poet and I sound like one.

blessing the boats (at saint mary’s) may the tide that is entering even now the lip of our understanding carry you out beyond the face of fear may you kiss the wind then turn from it certain that it will love your back may you open your eyes to water water waving forever and may you in your innocence sail through this to that

If someone gives you permission, they can take it away. I give myself permission.

Wishes For Sons 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.

who among us can imagine ourselves unimagined? who among us can speak with so fragile tongue and remain proud?

The literature of America should reflect the children of America.

dreaming your x-ray vision could see the beauty in me.

oh antic God return to me my mother in her thirties leaned across the front porch the huge pillow of her breasts pressing against the rail summoning me in for bed. I am almost the dead woman’s age times two. I can barely recall her song the scent of her hands though her wild hair scratches my dreams at night. return to me, oh Lord of then and now, my mother’s calling, her young voice humming my name.

a tongue blistered with smiling

her dangling braids the color of rain.

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.

i am rejuvenated bones rising from the dear floor where they found you

they are shrouding words so that families cannot find them.

The moon is queen of everything. She rules the oceans, rivers, rain. When I am asked whose tears these are; I always blame the moon.

was my first landscape, red brown as the clay of her georgia.

Poems come out of wonder, not out of knowing. Lucille Clifton

and at night my dreams are full of the cursing of me fucking god fucking me.

these hips are big hips. they need space to move around in. they don't fit into little petty places.

walked erect out of my sleep

America made us heroines not wives. We hid our ladyness to save our lives

come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.

i am accused of tending to the past as if i made it, as if i sculpted it with my own hands. i did not. this past was waiting for me when i came, -Lucille Clifton

mama mama if we are nothing why should we spare the neighborhood mama mama who will be next and why should we save the pictures

Maybe I should have wanted less. Maybe I should have ignored the bowl in me burning to be filled. Maybe I should have wanted less.

shapeshifter poems by Lucille Clifton 1 the legend is whispered in the women's tent how the moon when she rises full follows some men into themselves and changes them there the season is short but dreadful shapeshifters they wear strange hands they walk through the houses at night their daughters do not know them 2 who is there to protect her from the hands of the father not the windows which see and say nothing not the moon that awful eye not the woman she will become with her scarred tongue who who who the owl laments into the evening who will protect her this prettylittlegirl 3 if the little girl lies still enough shut enough hard enough shapeshifter may not walk tonight the full moon may not find him here the hair on him bristling rising up 4 the poem at the end of the world is the poem the little girl breathes into her pillow the one she cannot tell the one there is no one to hear this poem is a political poem is a war poem is a universal poem but is not about these things this poem is about one human heart this poem is the poem at the end of the world Credit: Copyright © 1987 by Lucille Clifton.

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

when you lie awake in the evenings counting your birthdays turn the blood that clots on your tongue into poems. poems. from “The Message of Thelma Sayles

I rise up above myself / like a fish flying...

is it treason to remember what we have done to deserve such villainy nothing we reassure ourselves nothing

Come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.

and we hang onto our no place happy to be alive and in the inner city or like we call it home

children when they ask you why is your mama so funny say she is a poet she don't have no sense

In the bigger scheme of things the universe is not asking us to do something, the universe is asking us to be something. And that’s a whole different thing. —Lucille Clifton

and adam rose fearful in the garden without words for the grass his fingers plucked without a tongue to name the taste shimmering in his mouth did they draw blood the blades did it become his early lunge toward language did his astonishment surround him did he shudder did he whisper eve

may the tide that is entering even now the lip of our understanding carry you out beyond the face of fear may you kiss the wind then turn from it certain that it will love your back may you open your eyes to water water waving forever and may you in your innocence sail through this to that — Lucille Clifton, “blessing the boats,” Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988-2000. (BOA Editions Ltd. April 1, 2000)

I don’t write out of what I know; I write out of what I wonder. I think most artists create art in order to explore, not to give the answers. Poetry and art are not about answers to me; they are about questions.” #LucilleClifton

BREAKLIGHT Light keeps on breaking. i keep knowing the language of other nations. i keep hearing tree talk water words and i keep knowing what they mean. and light just keeps on breaking… Collected in: Sisters of the Earth: Women's Prose and Poetry About Nature by Lorraine Anderson

and God has blessed America to learn that noone is exempt the world is one all fear is one all life all death all one

and i am consumed with love for all of it the everydayness of bravery of hate of fear of tragedy of death and birth and hope

i bear witness to no thing more human than hate i bear witness to no thing more human than love

thunder and lightning and our world is another place no day will ever be the same no blood untouched

Things don’t fall apart. Things hold. Lines connect in thin ways that last and last and lives become generations made out of pictures and words just kept.

and this is not the time I think to ask who is allowed to be american america all of us gathered under one flag praying together safely warmed by the single love of the many tongued God

Epigraph 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 other hand; come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed. —“won’t you celebrate with me,” Lucille Clifton

the st. marys river flows as if nothing has happened i watch it with my coffee afraid and sad as are we all so many ones to hate and i cursed with long memory cursed with the desire to understand have never been good at hating

Through this tradition of face-to-face oral communication, now in danger of disappearing, black folks maintained the conviction of their own worth and saved their own souls by refusing to fall victim to fear or the hatred of their oppressors, which they recognized would have been more destructive to themselves than to their enemies. As the poet Lucille Clifton put it, “Ultimately if you fill yourself with venom you will be poisoned.”3 There were incidents of individual violence, usually crimes of passion committed by someone under the influence of alcohol and over a man or a woman. But despite the unimaginable cruelty that they suffered, blacks kept their sense of humor and created the art form of the blues as a way to work through and transcend the harshness of their lives. Living under the American equivalent of Nazism, they developed an oasis of civility in the spiritual desert of “me-firstism” that characterized the rest of the country.

i am accused of tending to the past as if i made it, as if i sculpted it with my own hands. i did not. this past was waiting for me when i came, -Lucille Clifton

Somewhere in the unknown world a yellow eyed woman sits with her daughter quilting. Some otherwhere alchemists mumble over pots, their chemistry stirs into science, their science freezes into stone. In the unknown world, the woman threading together her need and her needle nods toward the smiling girl. Remember this will keep us warm. How does this poem end? Do the daughter's daughters quilt? Do the alchemists practice their tables? Do the worlds continue spinning away from each other forever? - Lucille Clifton

Smoke was hanging over Buffalo like judgment.

I am accused of tending to the past as if I made it, as if I sculpted it with my own hands. i did not, this past was waiting for me when I came,

Lucille Clifton, Adrienne Rich, Ada Limón,

His life had been full of days and his days had been full of life.

And I could tell you about things we been through, some awful ones, some wonderful, but I know that the things that make us are more than that, our lives are more than the days in them, our lives are our line and we go on. I type that and I swear I can see Ca’line standing in the green of Virginia, in the green of Afrika, and I swear she makes no sound but she nods her head and smiles.

Somewhere a scholar is preparing a manuscript on the poetry of Lucille Clifton while his child happily plays under the watch of a childcare provider, the cost of whose labor is paid without worry but the cost of whose living is a source of ongoing anxiety. Somewhere a Frantz Fanon scholar is spending grant money on addressing the built-in obsolescence of their laptop, the rare earth in the guts of which have been plundered from the ground in the new scramble for Africa; the toxic skeletal remains of which will be shipped away out of sight, out of mind, to be dismantled by dispossessed, non-white hands in sacrifice zones for digital capitalism. Somewhere a theorist of settler colonial economic formations is falling asleep on the train en route to a precarious adjunct gig an hour and a half from home, the text of the conference proposal in their lap blurring like the landscape outside, their eyelids heavy from last night's shift at the cafe at which the hourly pay is more or less equivalent to that which they receive for teaching. Somewhere a mid-career scholar is arriving on campus for office hours more relaxed than they have been in years, buoyed by a mixture of validation and excitement after having read an article on white supremacy in classrooms led by non-white faculty, text on page relaxing muscles, jaw, and gut, thinning the dense cloud of alienation in a department in which indicate phrases like "playing the race card" and "all lives matter" are replaced with more professional ones--like "you may be overreacting" and "try to adopt a student-centered approach." Scholarship, no matter how abstract its subject matter, is always already a material practice, a lived experience with complex, far-reaching physical entanglements.

they ask me to remember but they want me to remember their memories and i keep on remembering mine

I turn to hear the way you reach deep in the crevice of a tale to let me know the secrets of how to get through.

For me, poetry is a way of living in the world. I think that I don't produce 'texts' and I don't do it to be studied. I do it, though, I do recognize the value of those things but for me poetry is a way of trying to express something that is very difficult to express. And it's a way of trying to come to peace with the world. The mistake teachers sometimes make is that they think that art and poetry they think it's about answers and it's not about that it's about questions. So you come to poetry not out of what you know but out of what you wonder. And everyone wonders something differently and at different times. It is a mistake in poetry----it is not a mistake to try to figure out the ways that it is crafted, but its crafting is not what it is

For me, poetry is a way of living in the world. I think that I don't produce 'texts' and I don't do it to be studied. I do it, though, I do recognize the value of those things but for me poetry is a way of trying to express something that is very difficult to express. And it's a way of trying to come to peace with the world. The mistake that some teachers sometimes make is that they think that art and poetry they think it's about answers and it's not about that it's about questions. So you come to poetry not out of what you know but out of what you wonder. And everyone wonders something differently and at different times. It is a mistake in poetry----it is not a mistake to try to figure out the ways that it is crafted, but its crafting is not what it is.