Poetry: 


Lucille Clifton uses Kali’s image to explore how Blacks in America have been undervalued, just as Kali tends to be misinterpreted.
 
Merlin Stone celebrates Kali’s ability to “triumph” over time and time’s destruction, to “gather up the seeds” of new birth.  (Note that while she references the “Kali Yuga”—the “worst epoch” of human history, Rachel McDermott has noted that such a conflation of Kali with no diacritics and the goddess Kali with diacritics represents simply bad transcription, giving the goddess yet a further “bad rap” as the goddess of the equivalent of the “dark ages.”

May Sarton perhaps comes closest to understanding and celebrating the unity of Kali’s dual nature, but even she inserts a reflective sestina on the Holocaust as she links Kali to the Western mindset.