She was both the blessing and the boat. She was the book and the light. Lucille Clifton, a remarkable American poet has died. It is time indeed for a moment of silence. Close the books. Dim the lights. Stop walking. Be still in honor of a great life, a great poet.

At the age of 73, Lucille Clifton died today at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Born in Depew, New York, in 1936, she lived in Columbia, Maryland and was a longtime distinguished professor at Saint Mary’s College of Maryland. Lucille Clifton’s poetry won many honors including a Lilly Prize, nominations for the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Award in 2001 for “Blessing the Boats,” a book which I proudly say, changed my life.

In my many years of teaching, I have used Lucille Clifton’s poetry to teach creative writing to high school students, graduate students, college students, and prisoners on death row. Her poetry, so simple, yet crafted in stunning ways, could reach everyone. She could take your breath away in twelve lines.

Her poem “Jasper Texas, 1998,” written in honor of James Byrd, I used countless times to teach students to experiment with “voice” in their poems. “I am a man’s head hunched in the road” she wrote, haunting me with words from a man chained to a truck and dragged to his death.

Her poem, “In The Mirror” shows us a woman looking at the reflection of her body after losing a breast to surgery. This poem brought students to tears in many classes. She played with the power of the word t-e-a-r as a noun and a verb, describing how the one remaining breast mourned “the gash ghost of her sister.”

Her book “Blessing the Boats” is among the finest books of poetry I have ever read. I have given it away countless times and given its title poem to classes on their last day because it is so apt, it is a benediction. As a poet, Lucille Clifton was indeed both the blessing and the boat. Her poetry brought to countless readers the blessing of comfort and solace that will not be replaced.  And her life, so honest, unpretentious, and deliberate, carried many of us through winds and storms which only her hidden, grateful readers will ever know.

I was fortunate enough to hear her read at the Folger Shakespeare Library here in Washington, D.C. I also saw her at another Folger Poetry reading. She was gracious and humble, rare traits indeed.

Her poems about the days just before and after September 11, 2001 are among the few bits of wisdom I have ever read about those days.

Her poems about family and race taught me more than years of formal education. Hers is a voice we cannot replace. She is one of those poets who, with a handful of words, can cause an echo deep in her readers, which they will remember all their lives. There are poems of hers I can recite from memory merely because they mean so much to me, because they are true.

Lucille Clifton is and was an original. A blessing and a boat of mercy to all who sat still enough to read her marvelous work.

Here is her beautiful poem, “blessing the boats.” I read  this poem at the Library of Congress in September of 2009, as part of a reading I gave on the theme, “Life is good.” May it be the same blessing to her now that it has been to so many of her devoted readers.

                          blessing the boats

                          may the tide

that is entering even now

the lip of our understanding

carry you out

beyond the face of fear

may you kiss

the wind then turn from it

certain that it will

love your back     may you

open your eyes to water

water waving forever

and may you in your innocence

sail through this to that

                                     Lucille Clifton

                         

                                   JosephRoss.net