Rebel Girl's Poetry Corner: "this past was waiting for me"

There's a great deal to say today - even though the person Rebel Girl writes about often said so much in few words.

Lucille Clifton died last Saturday February 13, 2010 at age 73, at the end of a life that began in a large working class family in Depew, New York.

Clifton's bio is impressive - 11 poetry books (first one published at age 33), 20 children's books, a host of honors: three time nominee for the Pulitzer, National Book Award winner, poet laureate of Maryland for 11 years, professor at St. Mary's College of Maryland, Chancellor of the American Academy of Poets, and just this year, the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America to honor "distinguished lifetime service to poetry." And, not the least, she was mother to six children, grandmother to several, teacher of multitudes.

A poem:

i am accused of tending to the past

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,
a monstrous unnamed baby,
and i with my mother’s itch
took it to breast
and named it
History.
she is more human now,
learning languages everyday,
remembering faces, names and dates.
when she is strong enough to travel
on her own, beware, she will.

~ Lucille Clifton

Rebel Girl worked with Clifton during the summers at the Community of Writers in Squaw Valley where Clifton had been a staff poet since 1991. At the poetry workshop, Clifton wrote new poems each day along with the other staff poets and participants. She composed her daily poems on a typewriter, working on one of Oakley Hall’s shabby IBM Selectrics. It was Rebel Girl's job to collect everyone's first drafts early in the morning and make copies on the wheezing xerox machine. She'd wait for the copies to emerge, standing there, reading the poems, imprinted on the warm stack of thin white paper. Clifton's drafts were elegant, powerful, spare - and often many would appear a year or two later in magazines and journals, collected eventually in one of her books.

Rebel Girl still remembers Clifton's final poem from two years ago, how it achieved what her work did so well – three spare lines that captured the spirit of the previous night’s party at the Hall House, the week itself – and much more. That poem, the last, as it turned out, that I'd see from her, went something like this:

over the mountains
and under the stars it is
one hell of a ride

~
One more:

mulberry fields

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


~Lucille Clifton

She said it.


(photo: Lucille Clifton receives the National Book Award in 2000.)

UPDATE: To read the New York Times obituary, click here.