I have a memory of Lucille Clifton responding to a young poet who asked her how she managed to be a productive publishing poet despite having to raise six children, by saying, “I wrote shorter poems.”
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I have a memory of Lucille Clifton responding to a young poet who asked her how she managed to be a productive publishing poet despite having to raise six children, by saying, “I wrote shorter poems.” Of Clifton’s many brilliant truths, this stays with me. And this pithy elegy, “5/23/67 R.I.P.”, selected by Aracelis Girmay in a remarkable new gathering of Clifton’s poetry, would have been written when her children were young, and when America was burning with uprisings, and when Langston Hughes died. She accepted the heavy mandate passed on to her by Langston Hughes, to “remember now like/it was,” and we are the better for it.
5/23/67
R.I.P.
The house that is on fire
pieces all across the sky
make the moon look like
a yellow man in a veil
watching the troubled people
running and crying
Oh who gone remember now like
it was,
Langston gone.
