Search ITGO
Canning and Pickling
Please Support My Wonderful Sponsors!
Colleen’s Organic Gardening Blog at About.com
- About Those Ads...
- Wordless Wednesday: Tomatoes, Finally!
- Preserving the Harvest: Pickle Recipes from About.com Guides
- Fun Facts About Sunflowers
- Wordless Wednesday: Pretty Purple Coneflowers
- Reader Question: Cauliflower Turning Purple?
- Fast-Growing Cucumbers to Plant Now
- Wordless Wednesday: Cucumber Blossoms
Friends of ITGO
My Favorite Garden Blogs
- A Study in Contrasts
- Chiot’s Run
- Cold Climate Gardening
- Gardening Gone Wild
- Growing With Plants
- Ilona’s Garden Journal
- In My Kitchen Garden
- Kitchen Gardeners International
- Mr. Brown Thumb
- My Northern Garden
- My Skinny Garden
- Our Little Acre
- Pollinators-Welcome
- The Cheap Vegetable Gardener
- The Compost Bin
- The Gardener’s Pantry
- The Plant Hunter
- The Transplantable Rose
- Veggie Gardening Tips
- Zanthan Gardens
From the Archives
Remembering Lucille Clifton
One of the best things about majoring in English in college was all of the amazing writing I was exposed to. My sophomore year, I took a class about women and literature. One of the writers we covered was the poet Lucille Clifton. The raw emotion in much of her work, the straightforward way she had of expressing both the most beautiful and most ugly aspects of human existence, were both things that made her an instant hero to me. One of her most celebrated poems, “Homage to my Hips,” is a source of pride for hip-py women everywhere (including yours truly.)
I thought I’d share another of my favorite poems by Clifton (this one about cutting kale and collards, something I’ve done several times, and thought of this poem each time) in memory of her.
cutting greens
by Lucille Clifton
curling them around
i hold their bodies in obscene embrace
thinking of everything but kinship.
collards and kale
strain against each strange other
away from my kissmaking hand and
the iron bedpot.
the pot is black.
the cutting board is black,
my hand,
and just for a minute
the greens roll black under the knife,
and the kitchen twists dark on its spine
and i taste in my natural appetite
the bond of live things everywhere.
1 comment
1 comment to “Remembering Lucille Clifton”
TC, February 19th, 2010 at 11:20 am:
-
Such a great poetess, may she rest in peace.
I love collard greens!
I also loved the classes I took to earn my minor in Women’s Studies from Slippery Rock University. Major – English Writing.