In the poem, "here rests," after returning to care for their dying father, Clifton's sister Josephine turns to her:
when you poem this
and you will...
remember the Book of Job.
And though there was a suggestion of humor in that sisterly aside, there is a Job-like quality, an anguish, throughout Mercy, Clifton's 12th collection of poetry.
Lucille Clifton died on Feb. 13, after many health challenges. Published half a dozen years ago, Mercy reflects some of her struggles and works to transcend them.
Early in the collection, a poem begins:
surely i am able to write poems
celebrating grass and how the blue
in the sky can flow green or red
Then, of course, there is that inevitable "but." Anyone who has read Clifton's work knows that despite their accessibility and seeming simplicity of language, her poems are never that easy, as she acknowledges in this searing query at the end:
. . . why
is there under that poem always
an other poem?
In workshops, emerging poets are often warned against the use of certain words — words such as "soul" and "angel." Few poets have the voice, the moral authority, to pull them off. But Clifton did.
In the last long sequence titled "the message from The Ones (received in the late 70s)" she speaks of angels as a matter of fact, then provides this warning: They come disguised in the daily, and they:
will keep coming
unless you insist on wings
Clifton was an insightful and incisive poet, with many awards and honors to her credit. But I will most remember her for her generous spirit. I had the good fortune of spending time with her in the mid-90s when she did a number of readings in rural Minnesota, as part of a poetry residency. It was a bitterly cold winter, but everywhere she drew crowds — students, young families with small children, and writers of every stripe from the well-established to just-emerging. And she warmed us all with her poems and her presence.
