A Burst of Light

by Audre Lorde

And your privilege of being a Black lesbian came with pain dancing in the eye of your pores.

In order to make integrated life choices, we must open the sluice gates in our lives, create emotional consistency.

The fact of Black women’s blood flowing with grim regularity in the streets and living rooms of Black communities is not a Black Lesbian rumor. It is sad statistical truth.

But blood will tell, and now the blood is speaking.

A wealth of promise, of the student singers with their beautiful young Black faces, believing.

And I wonder what I may be risking as I become more and more committed to telling whatever truth comes across my eyes my tongue my pen—no matter how difficult—the world as I see it, people as I feel them.

I want to write down everything I know about being afraid, but I’d probably never have enough time to write anything else.

Coming to terms with the sadness and the fury. And the curiosity.

My poems are filled with blood these days because the future is so bloody.

How do I hold faith with sun in a sunless place?

When I’m open, I’m also less despairing.

Enough moxie to chew the whole world up and spit it out in bite-sized pieces, useful and warm and wet and delectable because they came out of my mouth.

I have reached down deep inside of me to find what it was we could share, and it has been very difficult, because I find my tongue weighted down by the blood of my Aboriginal sisters that has been shed upon this earth.

I do not say these things to instigate an orgy of guilt, but rather to encourage an examination of what the excavation and use of the true language of difference can mean within your living.

And first off I identified myself as a Black Feminist Lesbian poet, although it felt unsafe, which is probably why I had to do it.

I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out my ears, my eyes, my noseholes—everywhere. Until it’s every breath I breathe. I’m going to go out like a fucking meteor!

Someday something will, in fact, be too painful to bear and then I will have to act. Does one simply get tired of living? I can’t imagine right now what that would be like, but that is because I feel filled with a fury to live—because I believe life can be good even when it is painful—a fury that my energies just don’t match my desires anymore.

And yes, all the stories we tell are about healing in some form or the other.

In the bleakest days I am kept afloat, maintained, empowered, by the positive energies of so many women who carry the breath of my loving like firelight in their strong hair.

I learn tremendous courage from these women, from their laughter and their tears, from their grace under constant adversity, from their joy in living which is one of their most potent weapons, from the deft power of their large, overworked bodies and their dancing, swollen feet.

If living as a poet—living on the front lines—has ever had meaning, it has meaning now. Living a self-conscious life, vulnerability as armor.

If one Black woman I do not know gains hope and strength from my story, then it has been worth the difficulty of telling.