"homage to my hips" is a work by the twentieth-century American poet Lucille Clifton. Originally published in her 1980 collection Two-Headed Woman, the poem uses the symbol of its speaker's hips to explore the experience of Black womanhood. The work is a celebration of the speaker's body and experiences in spite of the adversity she faced, delivered in a confident, energetic tone. The poem uses conversational diction and simple declarative sentences to convey the straightforward, unflinching convictions of its speaker.
Like much of Clifton's work, this poem deals with themes of women's experiences, race and African American experiences, and resilience. Despite the gravity of its themes, its approach is playful. It consists of a single fifteen-line stanza. Though it has no set meter or rhyme scheme, bolstering the sense of the speaker's liberty and unwillingness to adhere to norms, it uses a number of musical devices to achieve a compelling structure. The poem makes particularly prominent use of enjambment, assonance, alliteration, and anaphora.
