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blessing the boats (at saint mary’s) may the tide that is entering even now the lip of our understanding carry you out beyond the face of fear may you kiss the wind then turn from it certain that it will love your back may you open your eyes to water water waving forever and may you in your innocence sail through this to that
Lucille Clifton -
I am a black woman poet and I sound like one.
Lucille Clifton
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I don't go get a poem. It calls me and I accept it.
Lucille Clifton -
In the bigger scheme of things the universe is not asking us to do something, the universe is asking us to be something. And that's a whole different thing.
Lucille Clifton -
Children when they ask you why your mama so funny say she is a poet she don't have no sense
Lucille Clifton -
telling the truth about children's lives is radical.
Lucille Clifton -
Come celebrate with me that every day something has tried to kill me and has failed.
Lucille Clifton -
Poems come out of wonder, not out of knowing.
Lucille Clifton
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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.
Lucille Clifton -
I keep hearing tree talk water words and i keep knowing what they mean.
Lucille Clifton -
To be a good poet, you must care more about the writing, than the writer.
Lucille Clifton -
The end of a thing, is never the end, something is always being born like a year of a baby.
Lucille Clifton -
All people, even one's own children, come with baggage. When they're little, you have to help them carry it. But when they grow up, you have to do that difficult thing of setting their baggage down and taking up your own again.
Lucille Clifton -
Every pair of eyes facing you has probably experienced something you could not endure.
Lucille Clifton
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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
Lucille Clifton -
born in babylonboth nonwhite and womanwhat did i see to be except myself?
Lucille Clifton -
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.
Lucille Clifton -
What they call you is one thing. What you answer to is something else.
Lucille Clifton -
they ask me to remember but they want me to remember their memories and I keep on remembering mine
Lucille Clifton -
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.
Lucille Clifton
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Tell the truth... maybe just to see clearly, as clearly as possible.
Lucille Clifton -
Even when the universe made it quite clear to me that I was mistaken in my certainties ... I did not break. The shattering of my sureties did not shatter me.
Lucille Clifton -
You might as well answer the door, my child, the truth is furiously knocking.
Lucille Clifton -
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?
Lucille Clifton