Lucille Clifton — song at midnight
Poetry Unbound
The Importance of Surviving
Lucille Clifton lived a very difficult life and she survived with tremendous power. She is inviting what the gaze should be having lived a life that would have been observed through a gaze of judgment for all kinds of things. So often people are used to being disempowered in how they're observed and the poem reclaims words such as "wonderful" The intuition of this poem is that survival is not enough, even powerful surviving and thriving isn't enough.
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