National Poetry Month: Lucille Clifton

"sorrows"

Lucille Clifton

who would believe them winged

who would believe they could be

beautiful who would believe

they could fall in love with mortals

that they would attach themselves

as scars attach and ride the skin

sometimes we hear them in our dreams

rattling their skulls clicking

their bony fingers

they have heard me beseeching

as i whispered into my own

cupped hands enough not me again

but who can distinguish

one human voice

amid such choruses

of desire

From Publishers Weekly: In Voices (BOA Editions, 2008) Clifton continues her celebrated aesthetic of writing poems for the disempowered and the underprivileged while finding humor and redemption among life’s many hardships. This book also highlights Clifton’s ability to write inventive dramatic monologues. Voices includes monologues spoken by animals, as well as by the food product spokespeople Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and the apparently nameless guy on the Cream of Wheat box. In 2007, Lucille Clifton became the first African American woman to win the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, one of the most prestigious American poetry awards and one of the largest literary honors for work in the English language. Clifton has also won the National Book Award in poetry for Blessing the Boats (BOA Editions, 2000), and is the only author ever to have two collections, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir (BOA Editions, 1987) and Next: New Poems (BOA Editions, 1987), named finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in one year.