In the poem’s last lines, “evidence” is a crucial word. Seeking “a safe, well-defined, acceptable unknown,” perhaps, we look for scientific validation of the mystery, a concept fundamentally not susceptible to this kind of metric.

“litany” opens with a bold and simple statement of identity—“today i am a black woman in America”—then moves into an ironic “lullaby” about what that means for too many such women.

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.

These poems show how a mother’s fear for her daughter is often the flip side of her fear for and of her son, of what he as a representative of his gender might do. How do we negotiate this very difficult terrain?

I had fun subverting the idea of an "Anniversary Declaration," which one might assume will be momentous and romantic, by addressing the dailiness and occasional strife that can accompany a long marriage, no matter how happy it is. 

The poem was written in response to the convergence of multiple artistic endeavors, each of which spoke strongly to me about history—one was the 'Migration Series' exhibit at MoMA for which the poem was commissioned, and one was the book 'The Warmth of Other Suns.'

Today’s poem reveals its form in its title; an epithalamium is “a song or poem in honor of a bride and bridegroom,” and it derives from the Latin & Greek words epi- (at or near) and thalamos (room or bridal chamber).