Lucille Clifton

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Lucille Clifton was born in Depew, New York, on June 27, 1936. Her first book of poems, Good Times (Random House, 1969), was rated one of the best books of the year by the New York Times. Clifton remained employed in state and federal government positions until 1971, when she became a writer in residence at Coppin State College in Baltimore, Maryland, where she completed two collections: Good News About the Earth (Random House, 1972) and An Ordinary Woman (Random House, 1974). She was the author of several other collections of poetry, including Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988–2000 (BOA Editions, 2000), which won the National Book Award; Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980 (BOA Editions, 1987), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; and Two-Headed Woman (University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), also a Pulitzer Prize nominee as well as the recipient of the University of Massachusetts Press Juniper Prize. Clifton was also the author of Generations: A Memoir (Random House, 1976) and more than sixteen books for children, written expressly for an African-American audience. Her honors include an Emmy Award from the American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, a Lannan Literary Award, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Shelley Memorial Award, the YM-YWHA Poetry Center Discovery Award, and the 2007 Ruth Lilly Prize. In 1999, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She served as Poet Laureate for the State of Maryland from 1979 to 1985, and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Source

breaklight

light keeps on breaking.

i keep knowing

the language of other nations.

i keep hearing

tree talk

water words

and i keep knowing what they mean.

and light just keeps on breaking.

last night

the fears of my mother came

knocking and when i

opened the door

they tried to explain themselves

and i understood

everything they said.

Published:

1974

Length:

Shorty

Literary Movements:

Black Arts Movement

Anthology Years:

2025

Themes:

Family

Nature

Womanhood

Literary Devices:

Enjambment

a line break interrupting the middle of a phrase which continues on to the next line

Personification

the attribution of human qualities to a non-human thing

Repetition

a recurrence of the same word or phrase two or more times