Homage to My Hips, poetry by Lucille Clifton

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Lucille Clifton (June 27, 1936-February 13, 2010) was an American poet, writer, and educator from Buffalo, New York. From 1979 to 1985 she was Poet Laureate of Maryland. Her work emphasizes endurance and strength through adversity, focusing particularly on African-American experience and family life. Frequent topics in her poetry include the celebration of her African-American heritage, women's experience, and the female body.

Clifton received a Creative Writing Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1970 and 1973, and a grant from the Academy of American Poets. She has received the Charity Randall prize, the Jerome J. Shestack Prize from the American Poetry Review, and an Emmy Award. Her children's book Everett Anderson's Good-bye won the 1984 Coretta Scott King Award. In 1988, Clifton became the first author to have two books of poetry named finalists for one year's Pulitzer Prize. (The award dates from 1918, the announcement of finalists from 1980.) She won the 1991/1992 Shelley Memorial Award, the 1996 Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, and for Blessing the Boats: New and Collected Poems 1988–2000 the 2000 National Book Award for Poetry. From 1999 to 2005, she served on the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets. In 2007, she won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize; the $100,000 prize honors a living U.S. poet whose "lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition." Clifton is set to receive the Robert Frost Medal for lifetime achievement posthumously, from the Poetry Society of America.

Her first volume of poetry, Good Times (1969), was cited by the New York Times as one of the ten best books of the year. Clifton's second volume of poetry, Good News about the Earth: New Poems (1972), was written in the midst of the political and social upheavals of the late 1960s and 70s, and its poems reflect those changes, including a middle sequence that pays homage to black political leaders. The book that followed Clifton’s dual Pulitzer nomination, Quilting: Poems 1987-1990 (1991), also won widespread critical acclaim Using a quilt as a poetic metaphor for life, each poem is a story, bound together through history and figuratively sewn with the thread of experience. Each section of the book is divided by a conventional quilt design name—"Eight-pointed Star" and "Tree of Life"—which provides a framework for Clifton’s poetic quilt. As we celebrate this last day of National Poetry Month, well as Poem in Your Pocket Day, we invite you to enjoy and share this poem, Homage to My Hips, by Lucille Clifton.

Homage to My Hips

By Lucille Clifton

these hips are big hips

they need space to

move around in.

they don't fit into little

petty places. these hips

are free hips.

they don't like to be held back.

these hips have never been enslaved,   

they go where they want to go

they do what they want to do.

these hips are mighty hips.

these hips are magic hips.

i have known them

to put a spell on a man and

spin him like a top!