“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off,” said Dickinson, “I know that is poetry.” But how does it feel to be exiled from your own heart-and not just artfully, but literally, from your real and fallible heart? This is the question I return to, a quality of thought and careful sensation I find in Melvin Dixon’s “Heartbeats” and the steady patient-turned-at-moments- insistent spondees of its lines that, for always renegotiating this pace, manages to maintain what sadness we suspect is present alongside something like strength, audacity.
#Best poems about growing up full#
Here I am, she says-despite a fight against my selfhood and survival at every turn, here I am-in radiant joy, in full bloom, in celebration of myself, and despite you, I’m still alive and alive and alive. To be a black woman alive in America and writing poetry is miraculous. To be a black woman in America is to be the unsung casualty.
To be black in America is to be endangered. Here, “on this bridge between / starshine and clay,” she not only beams out a nation that has tried to snuff her out, but knowing that the black woman must nurture and cherish her own self in the world, she divines this life as a rebellious necessity. Here is Clifton stepping inside the American poetic tradition-a tradition that never considered her, however multitudinously it declared itself-and fashioning a new mold for her life, for black womanhood in all its broad fields and rivers of wonder. This poem gave me a voice and a crucial model to carve out my own world, to know it is possible to sing a self. When I was growing up there were so few examples of what a strong, successful black woman could look like, much less a black woman poet-how could we, the unseen and unconsidered, find a place of our own not just to exist, but to thrive?įor all of us, black women born in Babylon, with our meager inheritance of oppression and the diminishment of our selfhood and a world that turns its back to say, “You are not enough as you are”-for a black woman to stand in exaltation of herself is radical, is necessary.
And here Lucille Clifton shows us that both joy and self-love radiating from a black woman is also a kind of defiance. Against a world that has marked us invisible and unworthy, black joy is important.
I have carried this sonnet-both an ode to the self and also an act of resistance-inside me like gospel, like armor. What a balm and a blessing this poem has been to me. We stand in the June of our lives and try to sing it all the way through each season, always ending each line on the word that brings us together as much as it pivots us into new revelations: We. One waiting around the bend of each American corner. One for every day of the week, one for each of our deadly sins. Like ourselves when we look in the blurry mid-morning mirror.
Like our cousins nodded off into prison terms or hyped into the ground. Know them like our neighbor's boy gone bloodied to bullets. Anyplace where sin gets hymned out-straitlaced into storefront chapels on Sunday mornings-but sewn back into Saturday night doo-wopped breakbeats, finger-snapped shuffles of promise. Someplace where the rhyme is always as good as the reason, anyplace where the cost of gin is precious enough to thin but solemn enough to pour on the sidewalk for the departed, anyplace where the schools are overcrowded and underfunded and black and brown enough to not really miss the Seven, who were underperforming on the standardized tests and had been diagnosed as ADD or BDD status anyway. Them lounging streetcornerwise in our consciousness under some flickered neon of mannish-boy dream. "We Real Cool" is the poem so many of us know from grade school: the Seven (that sacred number of the seeker, the thinker, the mysterious) at the Golden Shovel (the shovel be golden but be ready to dig your grave).
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