blessing her boat

i can't pinpoint precisely when i first encountered lucille clifton's poems -- definitely in an anthology of some kind -- but i do remember it was my sophomore year of high school. while knee-deep in denying the arc of my (homo)erotic desire. sometime just before, or soon after, alice walker's the color purple broke my world apart & remade it between the covers of that novel. & then zora neale hurston; toni morrison; gayl jones; ntozake shange; leslie marmon silko (who taught me what a novel could do aesthetically, aside from the compelling story); audre lorde; joy harjo; adrienne rich. bright lights, patron saints, talismanic all.

but lucille! i want to say it was "miss rosie." (& soon after i wrote a ridiculous imitation spin-off of the poem, one of those fledgling ones where you reach for words without understanding what/how you're doing what you're doing.) something about her poem(s) got under my white skin. & i didn't know what to do with it. except look for her words everywhere i could find . . .

but i will never forget when i encountered her work in its true, taking-the-head-clean-off power. (thank you, ms. dickinson for the foolproof definition.) perhaps also in an anthology. maybe every shut eye 'aint asleep. maybe the third woman. her "lost baby poem," yes. unbelievable. but what undid me, slayed me, moved me beyond words & tears, was "slaveships" (which i enclose here):

"loaded like spoons
into the belly of Jesus
where we lay for weeks for months
in the sweat and stink
of our own breathing
Jesus
why do you not protect us
chained to the heart of the Angel
where the prayers we never tell
are hot and red
as our bloody ankles
Jesus
Angel
can these be men
who vomit us out from ships
called Jesus Angel Grace Of God
onto a heathen country
Jesus
Angel
ever again
can this tongue speak
can these bones walk
Grace Of God
can this sin live"

--which, i think, speaks for itself. & an innumerable number of tongueless voices. what i remember thinking, then, was that this was what poetry can do. as i later learned from lorde, from harjo, from rich. what muriel rukeyser so shatteringly articulates in "the speed of darkness":

"My night awake
staring at the broad rough jewel
the copper roof across the way
thinking of the poet
yet unborn in this dark
who will be the throat of these hours.
No. Of those hours.
Who will speak these days,
if not I,
if not you?"

---which is what clifton did, poem to poem, book to book, throughout her life. for african-americans - even more, for black women - everywhere. & even for an angst-ridden, lonely, out-of-place white gay preacher's son like me.

bless her, bless her. & may she dwell in beauty now, & forever, as she did in life.