to my last period- Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton was born in Depew, New York, on June 27, 1936....
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		Poems About Aging
		Abandonment Under the Walnut Tree by D. A. Powell

		Affirmation by Donald Hall

		Age by Robert Creeley

		Age and Death by Emma Lazarus

		Almost Sixty by Jim Moore

		Beyond the Years by Paul Laurence Dunbar

		Blues by Elizabeth Alexander

		Demeter in Paris by Meghan O'Rourke

		El Dorado by Edgar Allan Poe

		Fear of the Future by John Koethe

		First Gestures by Julia Spicher Kasdorf

		Fixed Interval by Devin Johnston

		Forgetfulness by Billy Collins

		Gerontion by T.S. Eliot

		In View of the Fact by A. R. Ammons

		Looking Back in My Eighty-First Year by Maxine Kumin

		Moonlight by Sara Teasdale

		My Lost Youth by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

		Poem at Thirty by Michael Ryan

		Quiet by Tony Hoagland

		Refusing at Fifty-Two to Write Sonnets by Thomas Lynch

		Self-Portrait by Adam Zagajewski

		Since Nine— by C. P. Cavafy

		The Chicago Poem by Jerome Rothenberg

		The Edges of Time by Kay Ryan

		The Human Seasons by John Keats

		The Tower by W. B. Yeats

		The Widows of Gravesend by L. S. Asekoff

		The Young Man's Song by W. B. Yeats

		this kind of fire by Charles Bukowski

		To Chloe: Who for his sake wished herself younger by William Cartwright

		To Earthward by Robert Frost

		To Think of Time by Walt Whitman

		Two Horses and a Dog by James Galvin

		When You are Old by W. B. Yeats

to my last period
by Lucille Clifton

well, girl, goodbye, after thirty-eight years. thirty-eight years and you never arrived splendid in your red dress without trouble for me somewhere, somehow. now it is done, and i feel just like the grandmothers who, after the hussy has gone, sit holding her photograph and sighing, wasn’t she beautiful? wasn’t she beautiful?

Lucille Clifton, "to my last period" from Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton. Copyright © 1991 by Lucille Clifton. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of BOA Editions, Ltd., boaeditions.org.