Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980 by Lucille Clifton
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"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.
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.