The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde

The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde\ \ By Audre Lorde \ W. W. Norton & Company\ Copyright ©2000 Audre Lorde\ All right reserved.\ ISBN: 0393319725 \ \ \ \ \ Chapter One\ \ \ Memorial II\ Genevieve\ What are you seeing\ In my mirror this morning\ Peering out like a hungry bird\ From behind my eyes\ Are you seeking the shape of a girl\ I have grown less and less to resemble\ Or do you remember\ I could never accept your face dying\ I do not know you now\ Surely your vision stayed stronger than mine\ Genevieve tell me where dead girls\ Wander after their summer.\ \ I wish I could see you again\ Far from me--even\ Birdlike flying into the sun\ Your eyes are blinding me Genevieve.\ \ A Family Resemblance\ \ My sister has my hair my mouth my eyes\ And I presume her trustless.\ When she was young, and open to any fever\ Wearing gold like a veil of fortune on her face,\ She waited through each rain a dream of light.\ But the sun came up\ Burning our eyes like crystal\ Bleaching the sky of promise and\ My sister stood\ Black, unblessed and unbelieving\ Shivering in the first cold show of love.\ \ I saw her gold become an arch\ Where nightmare hunted\ Down the porches\ Of her restless nights.\ Now through the echoes of denial\ She walks a bleached side of reason\ Secret now\ My sisternever waits,\ Nor mourns the gold that wandered from her bed.\ \ My sister has my tongue\ And all my flesh unanswered\ And I presume her trustless as a stone.\ \ Coal\ \ I\ Is the total black, being spoken\ From the earth's inside.\ There are many kinds of open.\ How a diamond comes into a knot of flame\ How a sound comes into a word, coloured\ By who pays what for speaking.\ \ Some words are open\ Like a diamond on glass windows\ Singing out within the crash of passing sun\ Then there are words like stapled wagers\ In a perforated book--buy and sign and tear apart--\ And come whatever wills all chances\ The stub remains\ An ill-pulled tooth with a ragged edge.\ Some words live in my throat\ Breeding like adders. Others know sun\ Seeking like gypsies over my tongue\ To explode through my lips\ Like young sparrows bursting from shell.\ Some words\ Bedevil me.\ \ Love is a word another kind of open--\ As a diamond comes into a knot of flame\ I am black because I come from the earth's inside\ Take my word for jewel in your open light.\ \ To My Daughter The Junkie\ On A Train\ \ Children we have not borne\ bedevil us by becoming\ themselves\ painfully sharp and unavoidable\ like a needle in our flesh.\ \ Coming home on the subway from a PTA meeting\ of minds committed like murder\ or suicide\ to their own private struggle\ a long-legged girl with a horse in her brain\ slumps down beside me\ begging to be ridden asleep\ for the price of a midnight train\ free from desire.\ Little girl on the nod\ if we are measured by the dreams we avoid\ then you are the nightmare\ of all sleeping mothers\ rocking back and forth\ the dead weight of your arms\ locked about our necks\ heavier than our habit\ of looking for reasons.\ \ My corrupt concern will not replace\ what you once needed\ but I am locked into my own addictions\ and offer you my help, one eye\ out\ for my own station.\ Roused and deprived\ your costly dream explodes\ into a terrible technicoloured laughter\ at my failure\ up and down across the aisle\ women avert their eyes\ as the other mothers who became useless\ curse their children who became junk.\ \ Afterlove\ \ In what had been a pathway\ inbetween\ our bed and a shared bathroom\ broken hours lap at my heels\ reaching my toothbrush\ finally\ I see\ wide valleys filled with water\ folding into myself\ alone\ I cross them into the shower the\ tiles right themselves\ in retreat\ my skin thrills\ bruised and battered\ as thunderspray splatters\ plasma on my horizons\ when no more rain comes\ I cast me out lightly\ returning\ on tiptoe\ shifting and lurching\ against my eyes\ plastic curtains\ I hung\ last December\ watching the sun flee\ through patterns\ spinning\ always and never\ returning\ I spiced my armpits\ courting the solstice\ and never once did I abandon\ believing\ I would contrive\ to make my world\ whole again.\ \ Vigil\ \ Seven holes in my heart where flames live\ in the shape of a tree\ upside down\ bodies hang in the branches\ Bernadine selling coconut candy\ on the war-rutted road to St. Georges\ my son's bullet-proof vest\ dark children\ dripping off the globe\ like burned cheese.\ \ Pale early girls spread themselves\ handkerchiefs in the grass\ near willow\ a synchronized throb of air\ swan's wins are beating\ strong enough to break a man's leg\ all the signs say\ do not touch.\ \ Large solid women\ walk the parapets beside me\ mythic hunted\ knowing\ what we cannot remember\ hungry hungry\ windfall\ songs at midnight\ prepare me for morning.\ \ \ Continues... \ \ \ Excerpted from The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde by Audre Lorde Copyright ©2000 by Audre Lorde. Excerpted by permission.\ All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.\ Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. \ \

The First Cities (1968) Memorial II "I Die for All Mysterious Things" A Family Resemblance Coal What My Child Learns of the Sea Now that I Am Forever with Child Bridge through My Windows Second Spring Spring III Gemini To a Girl Who Knew What Side Her Bread Was Buttered On Nightstone Father Son and Holy Ghost Pirouette Generation Echo Oaxaca Father, the Year Is Fallen If You Come Softly Suffer the Children A Child Shall Lead A Lover's Song Return Suspension Cables To Rage (1970) Rites of passage Summer oracle Song Spring people Rooming houses are old women Bloodbirth After a first book Martha And what about the children The dozens The woman thing A poem for a poet Conversation in crisis Sowing Making it On a night of the full moon Fantasy and conversation Dreams bite... From A Land Where Other People Live (1973) For Each of You The Day They Eulogized Mahalia Equinox Progress Report Good Mirrors Are Not Cheap Black Mother Woman As I Grow Up Again The Seventh Sense New Year's Day Teacher Moving Out or The End of Cooperative Living Moving In Neighbors Change of Season Generation II Love, Maybe Relevant Is Different Points on the Circle Signs Conclusion A Song of Names and Faces Movement Song The Winds of Orisha Who Said It Was Simple Dear Toni Prologue New York Head Shop and Museum (1974) New York City 1970 To My Daughter the Junkie on A Train To Desi As Joe As Smoky the Lover Of 115th Street The American Cancer Society A Sewerplant Grows In Harlem A Birthday Memorial to Seventh Street One Year to Life On The Grand Central Shuttle The Workers Rose On May Day Cables to Rage Keyfood A Trip on The Staten Island Ferry My Fifth Trip To Washington Ended In Northeast Delaware Now To the Girl Who Lives In A Tree Barren Hard Love Rock #II Memorial IV Love Poem Mentor The Fallen Separation Even Memorial III from A Phone Booth On Broadway And Don't Think I Won't Be Waiting For My Singing Sister Monkeyman Naturally Song for A Thin Sister Release Time Revolution Is One Form Of Social Change Oya All Hallows Eve Ballad from Childhood Times Change And We Change With Them To Marie, in Flight The Bees Viet-Nam Addenda Visit To A City Out Of Time The Brown Menace Sacrifice Blackstudies Coal (1976) Rites of Passage Father Son and Holy Ghost Coal Rooming Houses Are Old Women The Woman Thing Oaxaca Summer Oracle Generation A Family Resemblance Song On a Night of the Full Moon Now That I Am Forever with Child What My Child Learns of the Sea Spring People Poem for a Poet Story Books on a Kitchen Table Pirouette Hard Love Rock Father the Year Has Fallen Gemini Bridge through My Window Conversations in Crisis The Maiden When the Saints Come Marching in On Midsummer's Eve Dreams Bite Suspension A Child Shall Lead Afterlove The Dozens And What About the Children For the King and Queen of Summer Fantasy and Conversation Paperweight Martha Memorial I Memorial II The Songless Lark Anniversary Second Spring To a Girl Who Knew What Side Her Bread Was Buttered On Between Our Selves (1976) Power School Note Solstice Scar Between Ourselves Outside A Woman/Dirge for Wasted Children The Black Unicorn (1978) The Black Unicorn A Woman Speaks From the House of Yemanja Coniagui Women A Rock Thrown into the Water Does Not Fear the Cold Dahomey 125th Street and Abomey The Women of Dan Sahara Harriet Chain Sequelae For Assata At First I Thought You Were Talking About... A Litany for Survival Meet Seasoning Touring Walking Our Boundaries Eulogy for Alvin Frost Chorus Coping To Martha: A New Year In Margaret's Garden Scar Portrait A Song for Many Movements Brother Alvin School Note Digging Outside Therapy The Same Death Over and Over Ballad for Ashes A Woman/Dirge for Wasted Children Parting Timepiece Fog Report Pathways: From Mother to Mother Death Dance for a Poet Dream/Songs from the Moon of Beulah Land I-V Recreation Woman Timing Ghost Artisan Letter for Jan Bicentennial Poem #21,000,000 The Old Days Contact Lenses Lightly Hanging Fire But What Can You Teach My Daughter From Inside an Empty Purse A Small Slaughter From the Greenhouse Journeystones I-XI About Religion Sister Outsider Bazaar Power Eulogy "Never Take Fire from a Woman" Between Ourselves Future Promise The Trollop Maiden Solstice A Glossary of African Names Used in the Poems (New Poems From) Chosen Poems: Old And New (1982) The Evening News Za Ki Tan Ke Parlay Lot Afterimages A Poem for Women in Rage October Sister, Morning Is A Time for Miracles Need: A Choral of Black Women's Voices Our Dead Behind Us (1986) Sisters in Arms To the Poet Who Happens to Be Black and the Black Poet Who Happens to Be a Woman Outlines Stations Equal Opportunity Soho Cinema Vigil Berlin Is Hard on Colored Girls This Urn Contains Earth from German Concentration Camps Mawu Fishing the White Water On the Edge Naming the Stories Diaspora The Horse Casts a Shoe Reins Wood Has No Mouth A Meeting of Minds The Art of Response From the Cave A Question of Climate Out to the Hard Road Every Traveler Has One Vermont Poem For Judith For Jose and Regina Beverly's Poem Big Apple Circus Florida Home Burning the Water Hyacinth Political Relations Learning to Write On My Way Out I Passed Over You and the Verrazano Bridge Out of the Wind Holographs There Are No Honest Poems About Dead Women A Question of Essence For the Record Ethiopia Generation III Never to Dream of Spiders Beams Call The Marvelous Arithmetics Of Distance (1993) Smelling the Wind Legacy--Hers Making Love to Concrete Echoes Domino Thaw Party Time Prism Do You Remember Laura Inheritance--His The One Who Got Away Depreciation Syracuse Airport Thanks to Jesse Jackson Judith's Fancy Production Building jessehelms Dear Joe Women on Trains The Politics of Addiction Kitchen Linoleum Oshun's Table Parting Peace on Earth Restoration: A Memorial--9/18/91 Starting All Over Again What It Means to Be Beautiful Hugo I Construction Speechless For Craig East Berlin The Night-Blooming Jasmine Girlfriend Lunar Eclipse Change Today Is Not the Day The Electric Slide Boogie

\ Library JournalLordea recent New York State poet, author of ten books, a self-styled "black lesbian mother warrior poet," and matriarch of the North American lesbian feminist movementhas been sorely missed since her death of cancer in 1992. For readers familiar with Lorde's seminal essays in Sister Outsider (1984), this volume offers a complementary view. The poems are not easy to read in that many of them document the everyday horrors of racism and sexism, eulogizing victims who would otherwise have been forgotten, Lorde's commitment to the fight against injustice, her struggle to raise her children, and her insistence on honest communication with women and men she considered her sisters and brothers are rendered passionately and urgently throughout her oeuvre, from The First Cities, published in 1968, to her posthumous The Marvelous Arithmetic of Distance (Norton, 1993). Lorde's ties that bind are those of blood and also of passion and conviction. Recommended where Lorde's work is popular.Ina Rimpau, Newark P.L., N.J.\ \