You could call this poem an elegy to a lost mother, but I read it more universally as an elegy to the lost kingdom of childhood.

These three Lucille Clifton poems are ones I love for their fresh, fierce, and sassy voice; compression; deceptively simple diction; rejection of punctuation and other conventions; humor and honesty; and above all, their joyous message of female empowerment, agency, and strength.

It will help, the poem seems to suggest, if we focus on family and the world of nature rather than the world of the human. Some aspects of that world are just too unbearable right now for a sustained gaze.