Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY

Lucille Clifton, one of America's most important and distinguished poets, employs brilliantly honed language, stunning images, and sharp rhythms to address the whole of human experience. Hers is a poetry that is passionate and wise, not afraid to confront our most salient issues.

"Although her work is often spare and simple, it is always beautifully and painstakingly crafted into poems that tell the truth, poems that insist on residing within the reader, poems by a poet who seeks and achieves the ability to be a vehicle for those who may not otherwise speak." —Web Del Sol Review of Books


donor
                     to lex

when they tell me that my body
might reject
i think of thirty years ago
and the hangers i shoved inside
hard trying to not have you.

i think of the pills, the everything
i gathered against your
inconvenient bulge; and you
my stubborn baby child,
hunched there in the dark
refusing my refusal.

suppose my body does say no
to yours.   again, again i feel you
buckled in despite me, lex,
fastened to life like the frown
on an angel's brow.