A tribute to Audre Lorde: black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet

Tuesday night a voice, or as you would say—my inner thoughts–spoke to me as I started my wanderings into sleep. My thoughts spoke to me this: Audre Lorde. It felt an odd remembrance at the last hours my consciousness. I remember her as she herself had stated: I am a “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet”. In my early college years and through-out my graduate education, her writings often were both cure and inspiration. As she stated in her famous essay, “Poetry is Not a Luxury”:
For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives. Read more