Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980 by Lucille Clifton
“Lucille Clifton is one of the four or five most authentic and profound living American poets. Her ear is fine-tuned to the subtle relationship of verbal music to image and metaphor; and her imagination avails itself of that osmosis by which the mythic is realized in the quotidian, the humble and everyday is illuminated by the spiritual.”–Denise Levertov
february 13, 1980
twenty-one years of my life you have been
the lost color in my eye. my secret blindness,
all my seeings turned grey with your going.
mother, i have worn your name like a shield.
it has torn but protected me all these years,
now even your absence comes of age.
i put on a dress called woman for this day
but i am not grown away from you
whatever i say.
