400
Jacob’s children too were four-hundred
years strangers in a strange land.
There were no parades to mark
my 400th year on these shores.
No great exodus, no parting of waters,
no home going, no promised land.
Hard to celebrate kidnapping and death,
massacres and lynchings, bodies buried
1,000 fathoms deep. Hard to celebrate
how we have died en masse
for every right we have today,
and I have seen my young children
in shackles and spit upon and sold away,
and herded into for-profit prisons,
and shot for playing with a toy gun.
I should be mad—
or blind or dumb with grief,
but I write, I laugh, I sing
and I take to the streets again
and again and again to ask in the name
of justice and mercy: stop killing me.
I am not going anywhere;
I have struggled with the divine
angel and I am staying here.
On the passing of Lucille Clifton
Lucille, sixteen years after you transition,
fall asleep from a scorpion’s sting, wait on the Lord,
I’m here thinking about you, the legacy you left
as though I were your only child, which is foolishness.
I am one of thousands to whom you never gave birth,
but to whom you were a mystical mother.
We watched you under the festival’s big tent
read poems as though you were born to be there.
It was your room.
You held us in your hand as the day began to dim,
transfixed as you read verse sweet as something
you might bake on a Sunday afternoon.
Lucille, I’m here
following you into dark woods, eyeing breadcrumbs
as I go, picking up what I can, finding semiprecious
stones, soup mushrooms, light-shy wildflowers
along my travels, putting them in my apron pocket.