Furia

Abstract

“Remember this,” Lucille Clifton’s poem “Fury” begins.1 The speaker then creates a vision of her mother tossing a “sheaf of papers,” “poems” into a fire, effectively ending all of her creative inclinations. “They burn,” the speaker-poet declares, and this burning is a symbol of the poet’s artistic rebirth into an entity filled with the fire of her mother’s lost artistic potential. “She will never recover,” we are told, and the following lines end the poem, but they propel the poet: “Remember, there is nothing / you will not bear / for this woman’s sake” (f, 45). “Fury” functions as a double elegy, once for black women’s creativity, and once for Clifton’s mother, who will die suddenly when Clifton is twenty-one and pregnant with her first child.2