Poetry Monday: River and Sea

The Mississippi River empties into the gulf

and the gulf enters the sea and so forth,

 none of them emptying anything,

 all of them carrying yesterday

 forever on their white tipped backs,

 all of them dragging forward tomorrow.

 it is the great circulation

 of the earth's body, like the blood

 of the gods, this river in which the past

 is always flowing. every water

 is the same water coming round.

 everyday someone is standing on the edge

 of this river, staring into time, 

 whispering mistakenly:

 only here. only now.

 Lucille Clifton 

 I saw this poem in an anthology about the wonders of geology called Bedrock. I thought: what a find. Then I checked the Internet, and it turns out to be one of Lucille Clifton’s more popular poems. It was originally published in her 1996 collection The Terrible Stories. 

 This poem makes a profound point, but in fact the statement whispered “mistakenly” at the end is both false and true, another level of paradox in the human relationship to the natural world, both captive participant and conscious observer of time and the river. 

 Lucille Clifton was born in Buffalo and lived for many years in Maryland, where she was the state Poet Laureate. She also taught at the University of California in Santa Cruz. Her New and Collected Poems won the National Book Award for the year 2000. She also wrote a popular series of children’s books about the experiences of a contemporary black boy. Her poetry was often about black women. Born in 1936, she died in 2010.