Blessing the Boats by Lucille Clifton

Blessing the Boats
Lucille Clifton

                                         (at St. Mary’s)

may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that

SELECTED BY DAVID NAIMON

In many ways I feel like I am here today as the host of a literary podcast due to impossible-to-anticipate moments of grace. At a pivotal moment early in my podcasting life, when costs were rising as the show grew, the writer Jesse Ball, unbidden, sent me three boxes of his out-of-print co-written book Vera & Linus, which for many years was the only thing I had to offer to listeners to entice them to support the show. It was a lifeline. Similarly when Tin House approached me to propose adopting the audio archive, the beginning of a many year symbiotic relationship, it buoyed me going forward. Perhaps most notably, when I risked leaving my job to pursue this full time and asked my listeners—”if i make this leap, will you catch me?”—and miraculously they did. I feel blessed. Which brings me to the poem “Blessing the Boats.” The poet Ama Codjoe and I have become friends through a moment, years ago now, when she called me in, reaching out to suggest ways I could do better, believing also that I could. And recently she sent me “Blessing the Boats” on my birthday. And the feeling in my body and in my soul, hearing a poem addressed in the form of a blessing is just remarkable. Why aren’t more poems written this way? I wish they were. I’ll also mention one of Ama’s own poems, “A Family Woven Like Night Through Trees,” a poem that expands our notion of family, where I could consider all these people who take a moment out of their day to help another, not just as blessings, but also part of a family too.

ABOUT DAVID NAIMON

David Naimon hosts the radio broadcast and podcast Between the Covers and is coauthor of Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing (Tin House Books, 2018). His writing has been published in Tin House, AGNI, Boulevard, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere, was reprinted in the 2019 Pushcart Prize anthology and the Best Small Fictions 2015, and was cited in Best American Essays and Best American Travel Writing.