Writing Poetry Can Endanger Your Health - Part Ten Section Two The Poet As Agitator

        The Poet as Agitator - Section Two


        For centuries, women's menstruation has been demonized, shamed and insulted. 'The curse' some people call it.
     Yet in the 1970's, an African- American woman came along who tried to change all that. Thelma Lucille Sayles was born in upstate New York in 1936 and passed away in 2010.
      Two massive social movements swept through the United States in her lifetime. One was the great Civil Rights movement that started in the mid-1950's and lasted until about 1965.
    Here African-Americans and its white allies tore down the barriers of racism and segregation that condemned African-Americans to second class citizenship. "I have a dream," the famed civil rights leader Martin Luther King Junior said at the great civil rights march in Washington, D.C., in the summer of 1963.
    King was shot dead in 1968, but his dream of equality never entirely vanished. And on the heels of the great upheavals of the late 1960's, new movements emerged to challenge the white male-dominated status quo.
     One of these movements was feminism which demanded total equality for women. This was called 'The second wave of feminism'. "The first wave of feminism," a women's studies teacher said, "was born in the U.S. in the nineteenth century and concentrated on winning  the right to vote for women." The second wave of feminism, she points out, went way beyond this demand to vote, which was finally achieved in the 1920's.
      By the late 1960's, Thelma Sayles had married a professor of philosophy who was also a sculptor. His name was Fred James Clifton. Thelma dropped her first name and called herself Lucille Clifton. She had been writing poetry since her teens or earlier.
     Now she was swept up in the civil rights movement and the second wave of feminism. She wrote many fine books and poems. Yet one poem she wrote puts her in the cultural history of the U.S. perhaps forever. It's a short poem called ' poem in praise of
menstruation'.
    
 'if there  is a river' the poem begins
 'more beautiful than this
 bright as the blood
 red edge of the moon   if

 there is a river..'

     Near the end of this poem clifton says about her menstrual flow'
 'pray that if flows also
 through animals
 beautiful and faithful and ancient
 and female and brave'.

    This fine poem challenges all the horrible things said about menstruation  and the women who menstruate. It celebrates women's bodies and being. And Clifton writes beautifully.
   This is a poet who used her talents to agitate for equality. Lucille Clifton was another great poet who was an agitator.