The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

by Audre Lorde

Which differences are positive and which negative are determined for us by a society that has been already established, and so must seek to perpetuate itself, faults as well as virtues.

The house of your difference is the longing for your greatest power and your deepest vulnerability.

Our differences are polarities between which can spark possibilities for a future we cannot even now imagine, when we acknowledge that we share a unifying vision, no matter how differently expressed; a vision which supposes a future where we may all flourish, as well as a living earth upon which to support our choices. We must define our differences so that we may someday live beyond them, rather than change them.

And make no mistake; you will be paid well not to feel, not to scrutinize the function of your differences and their meaning, until it will be too late to feel at all. You will be paid in insularity, in poisonous creature comforts, false securities, in the spurious belief that the midnight knock will always be upon somebody else’s door. But there is no separate survival.

You . . . flowing through selves Toward you.

If you come as softly As wind within the trees You may hear what I hear See what sorrow sees. If you come as lightly As threading dew I will take you gladly Nor ask more of you.

I share my face with you but love becomes a lie as we suffer through split masks seeking the other half-self. We are hung up in giving what we wish to be given ourselves.

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.

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

But hope is counter-revolutionary. Pressure cooks but we have not exploded

Look here Karl Marx the apocalyptic vision of amerika! Workers rise and win and have not lost their chains but swing them side by side with the billyclubs in blue securing Wall Street against the striking students.

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

when we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed but when we are silent we are still afraid. So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive.

To givebut not beyond what is wanted to speakas well as to bear the weight of hearing

muscles etch the difference between I need and forever.

What do we want from each other after we have told our stories do we want to be healeddo we want mossy quiet stealing over our scars do we want the powerful unfrightening sister who will make the pain go away mother’s voicein the hallway you’ve done it right the first timedarling you will never need to do it again.

I dare not tremble for them only pray laughter comes often enough to soften the edge.