Lucille Clifton Quotes

her dangling braids the color of rain.

i am rejuvenated bones rising from the dear floor where they found you

they are shrouding words so that families cannot find them.

I am running into a new year and the old years blow back like a wind that I catch in my hair like strong fingers like all my old promises and it will be hard to let go of what I said to myself about myself when I was sixteen and twenty-six and thirty-six but I am running into a new year and I beg what i love and I leave to forgive me.

Listen,
you a wonder.
you a city of a woman.
you got a geography
of your own.
listen,
somebody need a map
to understand you.
somebody need directions
to move around you.
listen,
woman,
you not a noplace
anonymous
girl;
mister with his hands on you
he got his hands on
some
damn
body!

If someone gives you permission, they can take it away. I give myself permission.

We need new words for what this is, this hunger entering our loneliness like birds, stunning our eyes into rays of hope. we need the flutter that can save us, something that will swirl across the face of what we have become and bring us grace.

The end of a thing, is never the end, something is always being born like a year of a baby.

Oh antic God
return to me
my mother in her thirties
leaned across the front porch
the huge pillow of her breasts
pressing against the rail
summoning me in for bed.
I am almost the dead woman's age times two.
I can barely recall her song
the scent of her hands
though her wild hair scratches my dreams
at night. return to me, oh Lord of then
and now, my mother's calling,
her young voice humming my name.

walked erect out of my sleep

And at night my dreams are full of the cursing of me fucking god fucking me.

these hips are big hips.
they need space to
move around in.
they don't fit into little
petty places.

The moon is queen of everything. She rules the oceans, rivers, rain. When I am asked whose tears these are; I always blame the moon.

May you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back

Tell the truth ... maybe just to see clearly, as clearly as possible.

People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry, and that's a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated.

What they call you is one thing. What you answer to is something else.

Things don't fall apart. Things hold. Lines connect in thin ways that last and last and lives become generations made out of pictures and words just kept.

You might as well answer the door, my child,
the truth is furiously knocking.

To be a good poet, you must care more about the writing, than the writer.

Don't write out of what I know; I write out of what I wonder. I think most artists create art in order to explore, not to give the answers. Poetry and art are not about answers to me; they are about questions.

Telling the truth about children's lives is radical.

You cannot play for safety and make art.

I am a black woman poet and I sound like one.

They ask me to remember but they want me to remember their memories and I keep on remembering mine

I think that were beginning to remember that the first poets didn't come out of a classroom, that poetry began when somebody walked off of a savanna or out of a cave and looked up at the sky with wonder and said, "Ahhh." That was the first poem.

Say it clear, and it will be beautiful.

Who among us can imagine ourselves unimagined? who among us can speak with so fragile tongue and remain proud?

I write from my knowledge not my lack, from my strength not my weakness. I am not interested if anyone knows whether or not I am familiar with big words, I am interested in trying to render big ideas in a simple way. I am interested in being understood not admired.

Poems come out of wonder, not out of knowing.

so many languages have fallen off the edge of the world

You are the one
I am lit for.
Come with your rod
that twists
and is a serpent.
I am the bush.
I am burning
I am not consumed.

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.

Children when they ask you why your mama so funny say she is a poet she don't have no sense

If i should enter the house and speak with my own voice, at last, about its awful furnitutre, pulling apart the covering over the dusty bodies; the randy father, the husband holding ice in his hand like a blessing, the mother bleeding into herself and the small imploding girl, i say if i should walk into that web, who will come flying after me, leaping tall buildings? you?

The literature of America should reflect the children of America.

I rise up above myself / like a fish flying...

The lesson of the falling leaves
the leaves believe
such letting go is love
such love is faith
such faith is grace
such grace is god
i agree with the leaves