"If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive."
- Audre Lorde
Some poets are pensive, some use humour to puncture holes in the sky of delusion, some poets burn slowly, others pluck their heart out and lay it before you, so there’s no turning away from the truth, from the nowness of their vese.
I’ve shared Audre Lorde’s ‘Power’ with you before, today’s poem shows the range of her intensity of engagement with the world. She felt deeply, and was a sensitive observer who didn’t let a single detail slip her precise gaze. But Lorde did more than just observe and document. Through her poetry and her essays, she created a way of looking, and a kind of reality that she desired and felt righteously. Activism almost seems too tame a word to apply to the complete immersion and commitment to an ideal that turns every experience into an enlightened embracing of identity and sensation.
Lorde, in her essay on “the erotic” reclaims the space of the erotic for the woman - ‘the erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.’ She makes a connection between work, sensation and eros. This uninhibited and sensuous spirit flows through this poem of yearning.
“the tips of my fingers are stinging
from the rich earth
but more so from the lack of your body”
