1. Read the poem 

  2. Do your own reflection on it, noting what it inspires in you

  3. Feel free to use your own reflection as your prompt or…

  4. Use the selection of prompts below the poem

  5. Pick one that inspires you and write (feel free to use only one or write several poems using different prompts) or…

  6. Don’t use any of the provided prompts and follow your inspiration from wherever it comes

Sorrows

who would believe them winged
who would believe they could be

beautiful who would believe
they could fall so in love with mortals

That they would attach themselves
as scars attach and ride the skin


sometimes we hear them in our dreams
Rattling their skulls clicking their bony fingers

envying or crackling hair
our spice filled flesh

they have heard me beseeching
as I whispered into my own

cupped hands enough not me again
enough but who can distinguish

one human voice
Amid such choruses of desire

--Lucille Clifton
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucille_Clifton

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Note: Next Read Around is:
Sep 17, 2021 at 4:00 PM PST

No read arounds on August 13, 20, 27; Sep 3 or 10.

My Thoughts

Sorrow is one of the core aspects of human experience. Anyone who does even a modicum of self reflection will someday find themselves looking into a lake of sorrow. It is what lies beneath our grief and anger, beneath the trials we endure at the hand of fate—the harsh vagaries and randomness of life—and beneath the violence we do to ourselves and each other. It is too frightening for most of us to spend much time there, too heart wrenching to pull up the individual sorrows and look directly into the face of our anguish.

Lucille Clifton's poem, Sorrows, reframes our experience of sorrow: first, by pluralizing the emotion, which shifts from the abstract experience of sorrow as a whole to the individual experiences of sorrow; and, second, by reversing the relationship: instead of focusing on our relationship to our sorrows, she imagines the relationship our sorrows have to us. She personifies our sorrows as if each one is a gracious angel. The winged ones that love us so much they will attach themselves to us, encapsulate our wounds to heal us and make us whole again. And they remain with us in our scars, both physical and emotional. When we cry out, the voice of our lament is lost in the collective cry and we feel alone and abandoned. But these angels stay true to us as they listen to the enduring desires hidden in our tears.

Prompt Menu

  1. By using the plural, sorrows, Clifton immediately individualizes or particularizes the emotion. Take any emotion (guilt, anger, joy, etc.) of your choosing, make it plural, and write about it as a collection of experiences rather than an abstract reference. 

  2. How would you personify your sorrows? Write a poem from their perspective.

  3. Take anything in your life you would usually consider from the possessive (my life, my car, my house, etc.) and write about it from the perspective of the other.

  4. In what way do your sorrows attach to you? Or take any emiotion and describe how that emotion attaches to you.

  5. Write about something you would normally find troubling as beautiful. For instance, worry: my beautiful worry…

  6. Write about some repeated difficulty in your life and the feeling that you’ve had enough of it.

  7. What desire is underneath your sorrow? What desires might be underneath the collective lament of humanity?

  8. As usual right about anything else from the poem or in your life that he inspires you.