Lorde, Audre

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  |   <A HREF="id160.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Young, Al"><U>Young, Al</U></A></div> <bR> <div> Lorde, Audre</div> <div> <B>Power</b></div> <bR> <div> <B>The difference between poetry and rhetoric</b></div> <div> <B>is being</b></div> <div> <B>ready to kill</b></div> <div> <B>yourself</b></div> <div> <B>instead of your children.</b></div> <div> <B>I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds</b></div> <div> <B>and a dead child dragging his shattered black</b></div> <div> <B>face off the edge of my sleep</b></div> <div> <B>blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders</b></div> <div> <B>churns at the imagined taste while</b></div> <div> <B>my mouth splits into dry lips</b></div> <div> <B>without loyalty or reason</b></div> <div> <B>thirsting for the wetness of his blood</b></div> <div> <B>as it sinks into the whiteness</b></div> <div> <B>of the desert where I am lost</b></div> <div> <B>without imagery or magic</b></div> <div> <B>trying to make power out of hatred and destruction</b></div> <div> <B>trying to heal my dying son with kisses</b></div> <div> <B>only the sun will bleach his bones quicker.</b></div> <div> <B>The policeman who shot down a 10-year-old in Queens</b></div> <div> <B>stood over the boy with his cop shoes in childish blood</b></div> <div> <B>and a voice said "Die you little motherfucker" and</b></div> <div> <B>there are tapes to prove that. At his trial</b></div> <div> <B>this policeman and in his own defense</b></div> <div> <B>"I didn’t notice the size or nothing else</b></div> <div> <B>only the color." and</b></div> <div> <B>there are tapes to prove that, too.</b></div> <div> <B>Today that 37-year-old white man with 13 years of police forcing</b></div> <div> <B>has been set free</b></div> <div> <B>by 11 white men who said they were satisfied</b></div> <div> <B>justice had been done</b></div> <div> <B>and one black oman who said</b></div> <div> <B>"They convinced me" meaning</b></div> <div> <B>they had dragged her 4’10" black woman’s frame</b></div> <div> <B>over the hot coals of four centuries of white male approval</b></div> <div> <B>until she let go the first real power she ever had</b></div> <div> <B>and lined her own womb with cement</b></div> <div> <B>to make a graveyard for our children.</b></div> <div> <B>I have not been able to touch the destruction within me.</b></div> <div> <B>But unless I learn to use</b></div> <div> <B>the difference between poetry and rhetoric</b></div> <div> <B>my power too will run corrupt as poisonous mold</b></div> <div> <B>or lie limp and useless as an unconnected wire</b></div> <div> <B>and one day I will take my teenaged plug</b></div> <div> <B>and connect it to the nearest socket</b></div> <div> <B>raping an 85-year-old white woman</b></div> <div> <B>who is somebody’s mother</b></div> <div> <B>and as I beat her senseless and set a torch to her bed</b></div> <div> <B>a greek chorus will be singing in ¾ time</b></div> <div> <B>"Poor thing. She never hurt a soul. What beasts they are."</b></div> <bR> <bR> <div> <I>"Power" is a poem written about Clifford Glover, the ten-year-old Black child shot by a co who was acquitted by a jury on which a Black woman sat. In fact, the day I heard on the radio that O’Shea had been acquitted, I was going across town on Eighty-eight Street and I had to pull over. A kind of fury rose up in me; the sky turned red. I felt so sick. I felt as if I would drive this car into a wall, into the next person I saw. So I pulled over. I took out my journal just to air some of my fury, to get it out of my fingertips. Those expressed feelings are are that poem"</I></div> <div> <I>-- Audre Lorde, "My Words Will Be There," in Black Women Writers, 1983</I></div> <bR> </td> </tr></table></body>