By Lucille Clifton
won't you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my one hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.
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"Few poets have written so convincingly of celebration," writes Elizabeth Alexander of Clifton in The New Yorker. "Clifton invites the reader to celebrate survival: a poet's survival against the struggles and sorrows of disease, poverty, and attempts at erasure of those who are poor, who are women, who are vulnerable, who challenge conquistador narratives. There is luminous joy in these poems, as they speak against silence and hatred...Clifton had six children and made poems not in 'a room of one's own' but, rather, at the proverbial kitchen table, with family life proceeding around her."
The Westfield Mall California Pizza Kitchen restaurants decided to donate 20 percent of their profits to benefit Haiti on Tuesday and Wednesday, so Jules and I decided that obviously we needed to go out to lunch. Of course, once we were in the mall to eat, we also had to stop in the Lindt store which is going out of business and selling off its chocolate at 50-75% off. Then we stopped in The Icing, which was also having a big sale, and one wallet and several pairs of earrings later, we finally decided we had better leave the mall before we bought anything else. So we came back here and watched more Avatar: The Last Airbender, including the episode in which George Takei's character says, "Wake up the captain and search this ship!" only to be told that he just threw the captain overboard, to which he replies, "Then wake up someone I haven't thrown overboard and search this ship!"
Paul made Merlot tofu for dinner -- a variation on Marsala chicken -- which was fabulous. We watched the second episode of Henry Louis Gates' Faces of America, then watched the Olympics -- I already knew the outcome before I watched Lindsey Vonn and Julia Mancuso, and I felt badly that so many women had such bad falls, but I was very happy with the results anyway. And Shaun White was fun to watch, even though I know so little about his sport and get so irritated with the announcers that I was recommending they call one of his moves the Whoop-dee-Dooper Loop-dee-Looper Alley-Ooper Bounce. Apparently today was the day that all the local animals decided they'd had enough with snow keeping them from their food sources, because not only did we have a raccoon nosing around on our deck after dark, we had robins eating the berries in the tree out front, the first time I've ever seen robins playing in snow (though my cats were less than amused by both of these development):
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