Audre Lorde

Rich continues: "Refusing to be circumscribed by any simple identity, Audre Lorde writes as a Black woman, a mother, a daughter, a Lesbian, a feminist, a visionary; poems of elemental wildness and healing, nightmare and lucidity. Her rhythms and accents have the timelessness of a poetry which extends beyond white Western politics, beyond the anger and wisdom of Black America, beyond the North American earth, to Abomey and the Dahomeyan Amazons. These are poems nourished in an oral tradition, which also blaze and pulse on the page, beneath the reader's eye."

Poems

The Black Unicorn

Tyler Franklin

Marion

For those of us who were imprinted with fear

like a faint line in the center of our foreheads learning to be afraid with our mother's milk for by this weapon

this illusion of some safety to be found the heavy-footed hoped to silence us

For all of us this instant and this triumph

And when the sun rises we are afraid it might not remain

when the sun sets we are afraid it might not rise in the morning

when our stomachs are full we are afraid of indigestion

when our stomachs are empty we are afraid we may never eat again

when we are loved we are afraid love will vanish

when we are alone we are afraid love will never return

and when we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed

but when we are silent we are still afraid.

The Black Unicorn quotes

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