Lucille Clifton

a woman unlike myself is running down the long hall of a lifeless house with too many windows which open on a world she has no language for, running and running until she reaches at last the one and only door which she pulls open to find each wall is faced with clocks and as she watches all of the clocks strike NO

mary is an old woman without shoes. she doesn’t believe it. not when her belly starts to bubble and leave the print of a finger where no man touches. not when the snow in her hair melts away. not when the stranger she used to wait for appears dressed in lights at her kitchen table. she is an old woman and doesn’t believe it. when Something drops onto her toes one night she calls it a fox but she feeds it.

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.

they thought the field was wasting and so they gathered the marker rocks and stones and piled them into a barn    they say that the rocks were shaped some of them scratched with triangles and other forms    they must have been trying to invent some new language they say the rocks went to build that wall there guarding the manor and some few were used for the state house crops refused to grow i say the stones marked an old tongue and it was called eternity and pointed toward the river    i say that after that collection no pillow in the big house dreamed    i say that somewhere under here moulders one called alice whose great grandson is old now too and refuses to talk about slavery    i say that at the masters table only one plate is set for supper    i say no seed can flourish on this ground once planted then forsaken    wild berries warm a field of bones bloom how you must i say

i would sit in the center of the world, the Black Hills hooped around me and dream of my dancing horse. my wife was Black Shawl who gave me the daughter i called They Are Afraid Of Her. i was afraid of nothing except Black Buffalo Woman. my love for her i wore instead of feathers. i did not dance i dreamed. i am dreaming now across the worlds. my medicine is strong. my medicine is strong in the Black basket of these fingers. i come again through this Black Buffalo woman. hear me; the hoop of the world is breaking. fire burns in the four directions. the dreamers are running away from the hills. i have seen it. i am crazy horse.

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

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

for j. byrd i am a man's head hunched in the road. i was chosen to speak by the members of my body. the arm as it pulled away pointed toward me, the hand opened once and was gone. why and why and why should i call a white man brother? who is the human in this place, the thing that is dragged or the dragger? what does my daughter say? the sun is a blister overhead. if i were alive i could not bear it. the townsfolk sing we shall overcome while hope bleeds slowly from my mouth into the dirt that covers us all. i am done with this dust. i am done.

if mama could see she would see lucy sprawling limbs of lucy decorating the backs of chairs lucy hair holding the mirrors up that reflect odd aspects of lucy. if mama could hear she would hear lucysong rolled in the corners like lint exotic webs of lucysighs long lucy spiders explaining to obscure gods. if mama could talk she would talk good girl good girl good girl clean up your room.

my sister Josephine born july in '29 and dead these 15 years who carried a book on every stroll. when daddy was dying she left the streets and moved back home to tend him. her pimp came too her Diamond Dick and they would take turns reading a bible aloud through the house. when you poem this and you will she would say remember the Book of Job. happy birthday and hope to you Josephine one of the easts most wanted. may heaven be filled with literate men may they bed you with respect.