Welcome everyone to another Friday Night Poetry Corner. Tonight I am featuring one of my favorite poets, Lucille Clifton, the brilliant one. This poem touches the dark places, the places were if you travel to them once, it might hurt just get a glance of its horizons again. These themes are sadly base in reality and they cannot be hidden or shun because of the disgust that follows it. This type of trauma, evil must be held to justice and it should not wait for an afterlife jurisdiction process. We must protect the ones who need it the most and you know who they are. You better know.
But, I will stop rambling and please read this poem and let me know what you think.
Shapeshifter Poems
Poem by Lucille Clifton
1
the legend is whispered
in the women’s tent
how the moon when she rises
full
follows some men into themselves
and changes them there
the season is short
but dreadful shapeshifters
they wear strange hands
they walk through the houses
at night their daughters
do not know them
2
who is there to protect her
from the hands of the father
not the windows which see and
say nothing not the moon
that awful eye not the woman
she will become with her
scarred tongue who who who the owl
laments into the evening who
will protect her this prettylittlegirl
3
if the little girl lies
still enough
shut enough
hard enough
shapeshifter may not
walk tonight
the full moon may not
find him here
the hair on him
bristling
rising
up
4
the poem at the end of the world
is the poem the little girl breathes
into her pillow the one
she cannot tell the one
there is no one to hear this poem
is a political poem is a war poem is a
universal poem but is not about
these things this poem
is about one human heart this poem
is the poem at the end of the world
Lucille Clifton
KG Bethlehem 