Meaning Is the River of Voices

Is the way Lucille Clifton
Put it in a poem. Meaning
The Nile and Memphis and Black

Apex and foreshadowing
Of long suffering to come,
Dreaming endurance to come,

Which ought to make you wonder
About rivers and voices,
All those waves rolling downstream

Past sandy flats and rocky
Generations, Africans,
Egyptians, and everyone

Who passed from that continent
To voice the rest of the world.
Are the meanings the voices?

Is the river in those waves?
Yes, and yet something’s missing—
A river can be a bed,

And sandy flats can be waves,
And the dry rocks can cry out,
And thoughts have unvoiced meanings.

The meanings are in the waves,
And everything’s wavering,
But, somehow, meaning escapes—

Thread forever in shadow,
In the way Clifton wrote it,
But where does the shadow go?