Mercy

Lucille Clifton is the author of eleven books of poetry, one prose collection and nineteen books for children.

the angels have no wings
they come to you wearing
their own clothes
they have learned to love you
and will keep coming
unless you insist on wings

whether in spirit
or out of spirit
we don’t know
only that balance
is the law
balance
or be balanced
whether in body
or out of body
we don’t know

the air
you have polluted
you will breathe
the waters
you have poisoned
you will drink
when you come again
and you will come again
the air
you have polluted
you will breathe
the waters
you have poisoned
you will drink
■

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following journals, in which some of these poems first appeared: Callaloo, Kestrel, Lyric, and Runes.

Thanks also to National Public Radio, which aired Ms. Clifton reading her sequence “september song: a poem in 7 days.”

Her collection, Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000 received the National Book Award for Poetry.

Other honors include an Emmy Award from the American Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Shelley Memorial Prize, the Charity Randall Citation, and a Lannan Literary Award.

In 1996, she was a National Book Award Finalist for The Terrible Stories and was the only poet ever to have two books (next: new poems and good woman: poems and a memoir 1969-1980) chosen as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in the same year.

Appointed a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 1999 and elected a Fellow in Literature of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Clifton currently resides in Columbia, Maryland, where she is a Distinguished Professor of Humanities and holds the Hilda C. Landers Chair in the Liberal Arts at St. Mary’s