ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on poet Lucille Clifton’s search for spiritual models that reflect the aging black woman’s experiences of gender, race, and age. This chapter separates the poetry into early, middle, and late periods that take different approaches to constructing the aging woman in the image of God. The poetry lends further support for attachment theory and social scientific understandings of the influence of the family of origin in adults’ construction of God images. The poems imagine God as an extension of the poet’s family line through experimentation with different models of divinity including a black Jesus, a black maternal divine, and ancestral spirits. The late period takes an eco-spiritual turn in considering the spirituality of animals and other sources of energy to come to terms with mortality and the possibility of an afterlife.
