The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde

by Audre Lorde

Are you seeking the shape of a girl I have grown less and less to resemble

We search each other’s shore for some crossing home.

But the night was dark And love was a burning fence about my house.

I am not dead, but waiting. When the last warmth is gone I shall bear in the snow.

The image is fire sun warming us in a cold country barren of symbols for love.

But if it’s said at some future date that my sons head is on straight he won’t care about his hair nor give a damn whose wife I am.

and nothing says that you must say hello as we pass in the street, but we have known each other too well in the dark for this and it hurts me when you do not speak.

We are hung up in giving what we wish to be given ourselves.

Even when they are dangerous examine the heart of those machines you hate before you discard them and never mourn the lack of their power lest you be condemned to relive them.

It is a waste of time hating a mirror or its reflection instead of stopping the hand that makes glass with distortions

and if my eyes conceal a squadron of conflicting rebellions I learned from you to define myself through your denials.

I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.

But when this grim house goes slipping into the sewer prepared for it then this whole city can read its own obituary written on the broken record of dreams of ordinary people who wanted what they could not get and so pretended to be someone else ordinary people having what they never learned to want themselves and so becoming pretension concretized.

We made strong poems for each other exchanging formulas for our own particular magic all the time pretending we were not really witches

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

There are so many roots to the tree of anger that sometimes the branches shatter before they bear.

the women rally before they march discussing the problematic girls they hire to make them free.

I know beyond fear and history that our teaching means keeping trust with less and less correctness only with ourselves— History may alter old pretenses and victories but not the pain my sister never the pain.

Have you ever risen in the night bursting with knowledge and the world dissolves toward any listening ear into which you can pour whatever it was you knew before waking Only to find all ears asleep or drugged perhaps by a dream of words because as you scream into them over and over nothing stirs and the mind you have reached is not a working mind please hang up and die again? The mind you have reached is not a working mind Please hang up And die again.

my head is a museum full of other people’s eyes like stones in a dark churchyard where I kneel praying that my children will not die politely either.

I will eat the last signs of my weakness remove the scars of old childhood wars and dare to enter the forest whistling like a snake that had fed the chameleon for changes I shall be forever.

Humility lies in the face of history

if we do not stop killing the other in ourselves the self that we hate in others soon we shall all lie in the same direction