"oh antic god" by Lucille Clifton

"oh antic God"
by: Lucille Clifton

oh antic God
return to me
my mother in her thirties   
leaned across the front porch   
the huge pillow of her breasts   
pressing against the rail
summoning me in for bed.

I am almost the dead woman’s age times two.

I can barely recall her song
the scent of her hands
though her wild hair scratches my dreams   
at night.   return to me, oh Lord of then   
and now, my mother’s calling,
her young voice humming my name.

Five days from now, back in 2010, Lucille Clifton left this life behind, but she didn't leave us without her beautiful poetry and writing.  Of all the poets I've mentioned this month, Lucille, to me, is a poet who wrote about being a woman in the world.  This particular poem shares an abiding love for our mothers--for all of us have one.

I had to look up the word antic when I read this, because that word has some interesting connotations.

1a: characterized by clownish extravagance or absurdity an antic farce

b: whimsically lighthearted : FROLICSOME

2 archaic : GROTESQUE, BIZARRE

While I wonder if she thought of God as clownish, I am inclined to imagine the more archaic version of antic--grotesque and bizarre.  In my mind that sets her God up as something that is odd and unknowable--something to be feared and never quite understood.  But the simplicity of the poem lends itself more to that idea of a lighthearted or whimsical God.  Still, the choice of that word adds so much depth and so many different feelings to this poem that I felt it important to mention it here.

The remembrance of mother, though--that longing for something that is no longer there, is something that many of us will experience in our lives.  And while this speaks of the mother being dead, I think it also speaks of moments that cannot be recaptured--memories of longing that remind us of who we are, the parts of our mother that linger within us, and the ones that over time have slipped away.

This poem made me think of my own grandmothers, and how their children (my mom and John's mom,) have dealt with that loss in their lives.  I wasn't very close with my real dad's mom, though she, too, has passed.  His birth mother died young--again, someone I will never know, though when I went to his funeral, his birth mother's family came and said I looked so much like her.  Still, I think of my dad's mom sometimes, remembering when she'd make strawberries with sugar, or the doughnut twists that I still love to this day that she used to get just for me.

Those memories, like the ones mentioned here, are good ones--the ones we long to have again but can't.  We have pieces of them with us--our genes reminding us of them, and then those fading memories of how they smelled, or the songs they used to sing--the way they'd call our names.  There is a sense in mentioning that twice the mother's age is passed, the speaker in their sixties, that they are longing for some help, or lamenting the early passage for reasons that will remain their own.  But we can find them in our lives--wishing to tell them things that have passed, wishing to ask them about whether or not the things of the present are as they should be.  Or maybe just longing to hear their voice--to connect with them in some way that makes us feel comforted.

And that last, the longing for the comfort of a mother's voice, her hands, her smell--that is the thing I most feel from this poem and that which I think resonates in all of us.

Lucille Clifton -- June 27, 1936 – February 13, 2010
Mark Lennihan/AP