maybe the morning the roacheswalked into the kitchenbold with they bad selvesmarching up out of the drainsnot like soldiers like priestsgrim and patient in the sinkand when we ran the watertrying to drown them as if they weresoldiers they seemed to bow theirsad heads for us not at usand march single file awaymaybe then the morning we rosefrom our beds as alwayslistening for the bang of the endof the world maybe thenwhen we heard only the tiny tappingand saw them dark and prayerfulin the kitchen maybe thenwhen we watched them turn from usfaithless at lastand walk in a long line away
the beginning of the end of the world
Lucille Clifton
cockroach population possibly declining– News Report
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“the beginning of the end of the world” by Lucille Clifton from EARTH PRAYERS: ENCOUNTERS WITH THE NATURAL WORLD: edited by Carol Ann Duffy.
Published by Picador / Pan Macmillian on October 24, 2024.
First published in The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 published by BOA Editions, 2012.
Copyright © 1991 by Lucille Clifton.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Lucille Clifton was born in Depew, New York in 1936, and educated at the State University of New York at Fredonia and at Howard University. She was the Distinguished Professor of Humanities at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and a professor of English at Duke University. Her awards included the National Book Award, the Juniper Prize for Poetry, an Emmy Award, and two nominations for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.
The wonders of nature have inspired poets for centuries, stretching far back beyond the Romantics. Beautifully curated by Carol Ann Duffy, the one hundred poems in Earth Prayers span widely across time, but in their moments of joy, empathy or difference, even the earliest poems reveal a concern for the welfare of our planet. Duffy brings these early eco-poems into conversation with contemporary voices writing into the environmental crisis, and through this dialogue sounds a clarion call to cherish and defend the planet while we can.
To encounter nature, these poems tell us, is to be humbled, to have our own smallness magnified by the presence of the sublime. Earth Prayers is a testament to the immense beauty of the natural world, and a challenging reminder of our place in ‘the living skein / of which the world is woven’.
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