the terrible stories

tell yourself that anytime now

we will rise and walk away

from somebody else’s life.

any time.

child, i tell you now it was not

the animal blood i was hiding from,

it was the poet in her, the poet and

the terrible stories she could tell.

She has received many fellowships, awards, and distinctions for her poetry collections and children’s books, including the Shelley Memorial Prize, the Charity Randall Citation, and an Emmy Award from the American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. She is the only author to have two books of poetry chosen as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in one year: Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969–1980 and Next: New Poems, both from BOA, in 1988. These were followed by Quilting: Poems 1987–1990 (BOA, 1991), and The Book of Light (Copper Canyon, 1993). She lives in Columbia, Maryland.

Lucille Clifton is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.

what is a man? what am i?

that brought the gore of the giant’s head
into my hand
the others i fastened under my tongue
for later for her for israel for my sons

and passion the fourth and the fifth
was the stone of my regret it was hunger

it was i who faced the lion and the bear
who gathered the five smooth stones
and the name of the first was hunger
and the name of the second was faith
and the name of the third was lyric

if you had stayed
i feared you would kill me
if you left i feared you would die

and every harp and timbrel sang with
what doth thy soul desire
and i did not know