I came across "won't you celebrate with me" last school year during Black History Month. I'm not sure if anybody noticed, but I was trying to put up a couple of poems a week by Black poets. As soon as I stumbled across this poem, I was immediately captivated. As I mentioned in first hour, it was the lines "here on this bridge between/starshine and clay" that grabbed me.
I'm a sucker for star imagery. Maybe this goes back to my 5-year-old desire to be an astronomer. (Which I quickly abandoned in favor of believing a life as a waitress would be far superior, much to my father's distress.) But is there anything more beautiful, more present, more distant, more inspiring, more terrifying than these pinpricks of light millions of miles away? The stars belittle us with the immensity of the universe while reminding us that, somehow, we are a part of this vast cosmos.
In Clifton's verse, I believe starshine is a metaphor for eternity, the afterlife. Clay is dust to dust, ashes to ashes--our beginning and our end as humans. So the bridge is the life in between birth and death as well as the connection between our small mortality and the infinity that exists beyond it.
The other phrase that compels me is "born in babylon." As I shared with some of the groups in sixth hour, I was a three-time Bible Bee champion at my parochial grade school, so I immediately recognized this as an allusion to the Babylonian exile in the Old Testament, the Kingdom of Judah was destroyed by the Babylon Empire, and the people were enslaved for many years. The parts of the Bible that deal with captivity and deliverance have been frequently alluded to in Black literature and art in America.
For example, Frederick Douglass made Psalm 137, which is a lament about the Babylonian captivity, central to his famous speech, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" When the speaker refers to being "born in babylon/both nonwhite and woman," she is writing about a being a part of a society that is hostile to her. And yet she triumphs by through sheer self-determination: "my one hand holding tight/my other hand."
I admire this self-reliance. It is something I lack in my own life. I had many models, and I wonder how much of my life I have shaped myself rather than fitting too neatly into someone else's design. Feeling so confident and proud of one's identity is certainly worth celebrating--a prospect as terrifying and inspiring as the stars.
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