My Dream About Time by Lucille Clifton


a woman unlike myself is running
down the long hall of a lifeless house
with too many windows which open on
a world she has no language for,
running and running until she reaches
at last the one and only door
which she pulls open to find each wall
is faced with clocks and as she watches
all of the clocks strike
                                             NO                          poetryfoundation.org/poem/241668
_____________________________________________________
Yes, just like me. I've been running all my life. From where? From one place to another place. Sometimes I ran while standing still. The reason why is that I had become afraid of myself. A self that was too large for life or too small for life, never a perfect self. Lucille Clifton definitely knew about me. Although she never met me. Perhaps, she knew all women. Did my mother have a running spell? How about my grandmother or the other generations of women in my family? I can say some of us stood still long enough to grow men up. In that we can take pleasure. Not proud of ourselves, but of those men who would help birth more girl-women like ourselves. Strong women who believed somewhere there had to come an end to the running. That's why we kept going. The belief, faith, that God made us for finite places and infinite places. Run, run, run...the end will come to one journey. Is there another journey? Only God knows that answer.

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