my dream about the second coming (1982/1987)

Clifton characteristically combines compression and demotic language (there is no word here that grade-schoolers would not understand) with many-layered allusion, starting with her title. Clifton could easily have called the poem “Motherhood” (which would ally it with other poems about working-class mothers, such as Gwendolyn Brooks’s “the bean eaters”) or “Annunciation” (since it is, after all, an annunciation, an angel bringing news about her conception to Mary; for another 1980s Annunciation, see Jorie Graham’s “San Sepolcro”). Instead, Clifton renders approachable, comic, and domestic that normally masculine triumph, the Second Coming. Her Jesus will not return in light as an adult,