The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde

There is a timbre of voice that comes from not being heard and knowing / you are not being heard / noticed only by others / not heard for the same reason.

It does not pay to cherish symbols when the substance lies so close at hand.

The Seventh Sense" Women who build nations learn to love men who build nations learn to love children building sand castles by the rising sea

Always in the middle of our bloodiest battles you lay down your arms like flowering mines to conqueror me home.

Recreation" Coming together it is easier to work after our bodies meet paper and pen neither care nor profit whether we write or not but as your body moves under my hands charged and waiting we cut the leash you create me against your thighs hilly with images moving through our word countries my body writes into your flesh the poem you make of me. Touching you I catch midnight as moon fires set in my throat I love you flesh into blossom I made you and take you made into me.

How the young attempt and are broken differs from age to age We were brown free girls love singing beneath our skin sun in our hair in our eyes sun our fortune and the wind had made us golden made us gay.

what we share illuminates what we do not the rest is a burden of history we challenge

Am I to be cursed forever with becoming somebody else on the way to myself?

Don't make waves is good advice from a leaky boat.

And I knew when I entered her I was high wind in her forests hollow fingers whispering sound honey flowed from the split cup impaled on a lance of tongues on the tips of her breasts on her navel and my breath howling into her entrances through lungs of pain.

Pulling down statues of rock from their high places we must level the expectation upon which they stand waiting for us to fulfill their image waiting for our feet to replace them. Unless we refuse to sleep even one night in houses of marble the sight of our children's false pleasure will undo us for our children have grown in the shadow of what was the shape of marble between their eyes and the sun but we do not wish to stand like great marble statues between our children's eyes and their sun.

Out of her womb of pain my mother spat me into her ill-fitting harness of despair into her deceits where anger re-conceived me piercing my eyes like arrows pointed by her nightmare of who I was not becoming.

I dream I am precious rock touching the edge of you that needs the moon’s loving.

this urn makes nothing easy to say.

we mark tomorrow examining every cell of the past for what is useful

I cannot recall the words of my first poem but I remember a promise I made my pen never to leave it lying in somebody else’s blood.

All the poems I have ever written make a small book shaped like another me called by yesterday’s names the shedding of a past in patched conceits moulted like snake skin— a book of leavings.

they will use my legends to shape their own language and make it ruler measuring the distance between my hungers and their own purpose.

Coming together it is easier to work after our bodies meet paper and pen neither care nor profit whether we write or not but as your body moves under my hands charged and waiting we cut the leash you create me against your thighs hilly with images moving through our word countries my body writes into your flesh the poem you make of me.

my body writes into your flesh the poem you make of me.

Joyce / you always hated / being furious / and without anyone / to kill.

my pathways are strewn with old discontents / outgrown defenses still sturdy as firebrick / unlovely and dangerous as measles / they wither into uselessness / but do not decay

compromise is a coffin nail

I speak without concern for the accusations / that I am too much or too little woman / that I am too black or too white / or too much myself

Your face straightens into impatience with the loads of shit you are handed.

I see much better now and my eyes hurt.

Death folds the corners of my mouth into a heart-shaped star. It sits on my tongue like a stone around which your name blossoms distorted. — Audre Lorde, from “Speechless,” The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde. (W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition February 17, 2000)