Dear Sista, I see you

 

If I didn’t define myself for myself I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.

Audre Lorde was uniquely defined in her stance to serve and protect community, education, love, and feminism.

 

She was a warrior poet on the battlefield of racism, sexism, classism, homophobia and capitalism.

 

She defined her own black and Caribbean poetic dialect and when she felt undefined, unheard, and misunderstood she traveled up and down the language of poetry and defined herself openly, responded with anger to racism globally and sexism vocally and published 11 vol. like The Black Unicorn.

 

Never watering down the fierce potency of poetry or in the five works of Proze, or the 12 essays of feminism beautifully exposed.

 

She confronted life, lesbianism, feminism, racism. She confronted death, cancer, mastectomy, classism. And she never backed down from any of it.

 

Timeless as the night sky revolutionary poet never dies. I have a duty to speak the truth as I see it and to share it. Not just my triumphs not just the things that felt good, but the pain. The intense often unmitigating pain.

 

Power, her painful poem could be written today by a different name. Telling the story of a police shooting of a 10-year-old black child. When the officer was acquitted poetry took fire and rage went wild. She wrote her pain.

 

Warrior poet, Pen as sword, racism slain. Words of freedom pumping through her veins. From Columbia University to the world knowing her name, Librarian, activist, poet, essayist.  Creating freedom in her serenity.  Her fight created pages for generations to live, and her stanzas a free identity.

 

Audre Lorde

Dear Sista, I see you