Tags
Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, Kevin Young, Lannan Literary Award, Lucille Clifton, Michael Glaser, National Book Award, Poet Laureate, Robert Frost Medal, Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize
raccoon prayer
oh Master Of All Who Take And Wash
And Eat lift me away at the end into evening
forever into sanctified crumples of paper
and peelings curled over my hand
i have scavenged as i must
among the hairless
now welcome this bandit into the kingdom
just as you made him
barefoot and faithful and clean
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Lucille Clifton, 1936 – 2010; widely-loved American poet, writer, educator. Her work is informed, but not circumscribed, by her African American heritage. Recipient of many awards, including the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the National Book Award for Poetry, and, posthumously, the Robert Frost Medal for lifetime achievement (from the Poetry Society of America). She was Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1979 to 1985.
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I found this poem in The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965 – 2010, a beautifully presented and comprehensive volume published in 2012.
Edited by Kevin Young and Michael S. Glaser, with a concluding essay by Young, titled: won’t you celebrate with me: the poetry of Lucille Clifton; and a foreword by Toni Morrison. This book was recently named winner of the 2013 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a national award presented to published writers of African descent by the national community of Black writers in the United States. The award recognizes the highest quality writing in the categories of Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry. “racoon prayer” originally appeared in the collection Voices (2008).
WordVerseUniverse 
This one makes me smile as it brings to mind Phyllis, a raccoon I kept as a pet when I was a boy.
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:) Ah yes, the racoons of our lives . . . Somehow I’ve never been friendly enough with a particular one to name it. Currently there’s one staying under our shed (we’ve been known to call him The Bottomless Pit, it’s true); I hope he doesn’t have a problem coexisting with a more extraordinary visitor this year, what seemed to me an extremely light-coloured opossum (his ID: Longnose)—though it turns out they’re all more or less this colour: there’s a very nice piece about them on mnn (mother nature network), which is “brought to you by the National Association of Advancement for Opossums” :)
http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/animals/stories/10-things-you-didnt-know-about-opossums
Live and learn.
UPDATE: Sadly, in August there was a possum run over in the road a little downhill from us. I encounter them so rarely that I can’t help but feel this was our May visitor.
Life.
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Such a wonderful poem. I have more raccoon tales than you can believe, including the three-year long saga of a mama who would bring her babies for me to see each spring. She’d carry them up a tree to the balcony of my second floor apartment, then scratch until I came and looked. Then, she’d carry them all down again, and back to the woods. My goodness, I loved those raccoons!
I wasn’t so fond of the one that boarded the sailboat farther down the coast, mostly because it ate all the Pepperidge Farm cookies. Even we raccoon lovers have our limits!
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They sure manage to bring out a wide range of emotions in people — in different people or, as you recount, even in the same person. Thanks for the Follow :)
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