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If You Come As Softly As Wind Within The Trees You May Hear What I Hear See What Sorrow Sees. If You Come As Lightly As Threading Dew I Will Take You Gladly Nor Ask More Of You. You May Sit Beside Me Silent As A Breath Only Those Who Stay Dead Shall Remember Death. And If You Come I Will Be Silent Nor Speak Harsh Words To You. I Will Not Ask You Why, Now. Or How, Or What You Do. We Shall Sit Here, Softly Beneath Two Different Years And The Rich Earth Between Us Shall Drink Our Tears.

-Audre Lorde

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If You Come As

Audre Lorde

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If You Come As Softly As Wind Within The Trees You May Hear What I Hear See What Sorrow Sees. If You Come As Lightly As Threading Dew I Will Take You Gladly Nor Ask More Of You. You May Sit Beside Me Silent As A Breath Only Those Who Stay Dead Shall Remember Death. And If You Come I Will Be Silent Nor Speak Harsh Words To You. I Will Not Ask You Why, Now. Or How, Or What You Do. We Shall Sit Here, Softly Beneath Two Different Years And The Rich Earth Between Us Shall Drink Our Tears.

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You Cannot Use Someone Else's Fire. You Can Only Use Your Own. And In Order To Do That, You Must First Be Willing To Believe That You Have It.

. . . It Is Through Poetry That We Give Name To Those Ideas Which Are-until The Poem-nameless And Formless, About To Be Birthed, But Already Felt.

I Was Going To Die, If Not Sooner, Then Later, Whether Or Not I Had Ever Spoken Myself. My Silences Had Not Protected Me. Your Silence Will Not Protect You.

There Is A Timbre Of Voice That Comes From Not Being Heard And Knowing / You Are Not Being Heard / Noticed Only By Others / Not Heard For The Same Reason.

We Must Recognize And Nurture The Creative Parts Of Each Other Without Always Understanding What Will Be Created.

We Are All In The Process Of Becoming.

You Loved People And You Came To Depend On Their Being There. But People Died Or Changed Or Went Away And It Hurt Too Much. The Only Way To Avoid That Poin Was Not To Love Anyone, And Not To Let Anyone Get Too Close Or Too Important. The Secret Of Not Being Hurt Like This Again, I Decided, Was Never Depending On Anyone, Never Needing, Never Loving.it Is The Last Dream Of Children, To Be Forever Untouched.

For We Have Built Into All Of Us, Old Blueprints Of Expectation And Response, Old Structures Of Oppression And These Must Be Altered At The Same Time That We Alter The Living Condition Which Are The Result Of Those Structures. For The Master's Tool Will Never Dismantle The Master's House.

When You Reach Out And Touch Other Human Beings, It Doesn't Matter Whether You Call It Therapy Or Teaching Or Poetry.

There Is No Thing As A Single-issue Struggle Because We Do Not Live Single-issue Lives.

I Became More Courageous By Doing The Very Things I Needed To Be Courageous For-first, A Little, And Badly. Then, Bit By Bit, More And Better. Being Avidly-sometimes Annoy-ingly-curious And Persistent About Discovering How Others Were Doing What I Wanted To Do.

I Soon Discovered That If You Keep Your Mouth Shut, People Are Apt To Believe You Know Everything, And They Begin To Feel Freer And Freer To Tell You Anything, Anxious To Show That They Know Something, Too.

I Have Come To Believe Over And Over Again That What Is Most Important To Me Must Be Spoken, Made Verbal And Shared, Even At The Risk Of Having It Bruised Or Misunderstood. That The Speaking Profits Me, Beyond Any Other Effect....what I Most Regretted Were My Silences. Of What Had I Ever Been Afraid? ...death On The Other Hand, Is The Final Silence...my Silences Had Not Protected Me. Your Silences Will Not Protect You.

As A Black Lesbian Feminist Comfortable With The Many Different Ingredients Of My Identity, And A Woman Committed To Racial And Sexual Freedom From Oppression, I Find I Am Constantly Being Encouraged To Pluck Out Some One Aspect Of Myself And Present This As The Meaningful Whole, Eclipsing Or Denying The Other Parts Of Self. But This Is A Destructive And Fragmenting Way To Live.

Guilt Is Not A Response To Anger; It Is A Response To One's Own Actions Or Lack Of Action.

In Our Work And In Our Living, We Must Recognize That Difference Is A Reason For Celebration And Growth, Rather Than A Reason For Destruction.

One Pays A Lot, We All Pay A Lot, For Awareness.

Pornography Is A Direct Denial Of The Power Of The Erotic, For It Represents The Suppression Of True Feeling. Pornography Emphasizes Sensation Without Feeling.

We Have To Consciously Study How To Be Tender With Each Other Until It Becomes A Habit Because What Was Native Has Been Stolen From Us, The Love Of Black Women For Each Other.

I Can't Really Define It In Sexual Terms Alone Although Our Sexuality Is So Energizing Why Not Enjoy It Too?

... 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.

What Is There Possibly Left For Us To Be Afraid Of, After We Have Dealt Face To Face With Death And Not Embraced It? Once I Accept The Existence Of Dying As A Life Process, Who Can Ever Have Power Over Me Again?

Every Woman I Have Ever Loved Has Left Her Print Upon Me, Where I Loved Some Invaluable Piece Of Myself Apart From Me-so Different That I Had To Stretch And Grow In Order To Recognize Her. And In That Growing, We Came To Separation, That Place Where Work Begins.

It Is Not Our Differences That Divide Us. It Is Our Inability To Recognize, Accept, And Celebrate Those Differences.

Advocating The Mere Tolerance Of Difference Between Women Is The Grossest Reformism. It Is A Total Denial Of The Creative Function Of Difference In Our Lives. Difference Must Be Not Merely Toleration, But Seen As A Fund Of Necessary Polarities Between Which Our Creativity Can Spark Like A Dialectic. Only Then Does The Necessity For Interdependency Become Unthreatening. Only Within The Interdependency Of Different Strengths, Acknowledged And Equal, Can The Power To Seek New Ways Of Being In The World Generate, As Well As The Courage And Sustenance To Act Where There Are No Charters

Anger, Used, Does Not Destroy. Hatred Does.

If What We Need To Dream, To Move Our Spirits Most Deeply And Directly Toward And Through Promise, Is Discounted As A Luxury, Then We Give Up The Core -- The Fountain -- Of Our Power, Our Womanness; We Give Up The Future Of Our Worlds. (from "poetry Is Not A Luxury")

‎once We Recognize What It Is We Are Feeling, Once We Recognize We Can Feel Deeply, Love Deeply, Can Feel Joy, Then We Will Demand That All Parts Of Our Lives Produce That Kind Of Joy.

If You Don’t Define Yourself For Yourself Then You Will Be Crushed Into Other's Fantasies Of You And Eaten Alive

Define Yourself

In Discussions Around The Hiring And Firing Of Black Faculty At Universities, The Charge Is Frequently Heard That Black Women Are More Easily Hired Than Are Black Men.

Say What You Have To Say Now! Don't Wait Until You're Sending Blips From The Other Side.

The Erotic Has Often Been Misnamed By Men And Used Against Women. It Has Been Made Into The Confused, The Trivial, The Psychotic, The Plasticized Sensation.

The Quality Of Light By Which We Scrutinize Our Lives Has Direct Bearing Upon The Product Which We Live, And Upon The Changes Which We Hope To Bring About Through Those Lives. It Is Within This Light That We Form Those Ideas By Which We Pursue Our Magic And Make It Realized. This Is Poetry As Illumination, For It Is Through Poetry That We Give Name To Those Ideas Which Are, Until The Poem, Nameless And Formless-about To Be Birthed, But Already Felt.

Hopefully, We Can Learn From The 60s That We Cannot Afford To Do Our Enemies Work By Destroying Each Other.

When I Hear The Deepest Truths I Speak Coming Out Of My Mouth Sounding Like My Mother's, Even Remembering How I Fought Against Her, I Have To Reassess Both Our Relationship As Well As The Sources Of My Knowing.

Black Women Sharing Close Ties With Each Other, Politically Or Emotionally, Are Not The Enemies Of Black Men.

Self-care Is Not About Self-indulgence , It Is About Self-preservati On.

Black And Third World People Are Expected To Educate White People As To Our Humanity. Women Are Expected To Educate Men. Lesbians And Gay Men Are Expected To Educate The Heterosexual World. The Oppressors Maintain Their Position And Evade Their Responsibility For Their Own Actions. There Is A Constant Drain Of Energy Which Might Be Better Used In Redefining Ourselves And Devising Realistic Scenarios For Altering The Present And Constructing The Future.

Somedays, If Bitterness Were A Whetstone, I Could Be Sharp As Grief.

In Order To Perpetuate Itself, Every Oppression Must Corrupt Or Distort Those Various Sources Of Power Within The Culture Of The Oppressed That Can Provide Energy For Change.

I Have Died Too Many Deaths That Were Not Mine.

We Cannot Settle For The Pretenses Of Connection, Or For The Parodies Of Self-love.

But The True Feminist Deals Out Of A Lesbian Consciousness Whether Or Not She Ever Sleeps With Women.

The Difference Between Poetry And Rhetoric Is Being Ready To Kill Yourself Instead Of Your Children.

Every Woman I Have Ever Known Has Made A Lasting Impression On My Soul.

Lasting Impressions

It Does Not Pay To Cherish Symbols When The Substance Lies So Close At Hand.

When We Speak We Are Afraid Our Words Will Not Be Heard Or Welcomed. But When We Are Silent, We Are Still Afraid. So It Is Better To Speak.

The Transformation Of Silence Into Language And Action Is An Act Of Self-revelation .

Guilt Is Only Another Way Of Avoiding Informed Action.

Out Of My Flesh That Hungers And My Mouth That Knows Comes The Shape I Am Seeking For Reason.

I Have Always Wanted To Be Both Man And Woman, To Incorporate The Strongest And Richest Parts Of My Mother And Father Within/into Me - To Share Valleys And Mountains Upon My Body The Way The Earth Does In Hills And Peaks.

But, On The Other Hand, I Get Bored With Racism Too And Recognize That There Are Still Many Things To Be Said About A Black Person And A White Person Loving Each Other In A Racist Society.

Oppression Is As American As Apple Pie.

Pain Is An Event ... Suffering, On The Other Hand, Is The Nightmare Reliving Of Unscrutinized And Unmetabolized Pain.

When I Speak Of The Erotic, Then I Speak Of It As An Assertion Of The Life Force Of Women; Of That Creative Energy Empowered, The Knowledge And Use Of Which We Are Now Reclaiming In Our Language, Our History, Our Dancing, Our Loving, Our Work, Our Lives.

I Started Writing Because I Had A Need Inside Of Me To Create Something That Was Not There

You Know How Fighting Fish Do It? They Blow Bubbles And In Each One Of Those Bubbles Is An Egg And They Float The Egg Up To The Surface. They Keep This Whole Heavy Nest Of Eggs Floating, And They're Constantly Repairing It. It's As If They Live In Both Elements.

It Is Axiomatic That If We Do Not Define Ourselves For Ourselves, We Will Be Defined By Others-for Their Use And To Our Detriment.

Black Women Are Programmed To Define Ourselves Within This Male Attention And To Compete With Each Other For It Rather Than To Recognize And Move Upon Our Common Interests.

Wherever The Bird With No Feet Flew, She Found Trees With No Limbs.

Stoicism And Silence Does Not Serve Us Nor Our Communities, Only The Forces Of Things As They Are.

We're Supposed To See "universal" Love As Heterosexual. What I Insist Upon In My Work Is That There Is No Such Thing As Universal Love In Literature.

I Believe One Of The Hardest Things You Can Do Is Conquer Your Fears, But If You Have A Goal, Then It's Your Job To Open Up And Let It Be Real No Matter How Scary It Seems.

Each Time You Love, Love As Deeply As If It Were Forever.

The Fear That We Cannot Grow Beyond Whatever Distortions We May Find Within Ourselves Keeps Us Docile And Loyal And Obedient, Externally Defined, And Leads Us To Accept Many Facets Of Our Own Oppression As Women.

You Are The One That You Are Looking For.

Our Visions Begin With Our Desires.

There Are No Honest Poems About Dead Women.

Pain Is Important: How We Evade It, How We Succumb To It, How We Deal With It, How We Transcend It.

... It Is Not Difference Which Immobilizes Us, But Silence.

There Is No Hierarchy Of Oppressions

If White American Feminist Theory Need Not Deal With The Differences Between Us, And The Resulting Difference In Our Oppressions, Then How Do You Deal With The Fact That The Women Who Clean Your Houses And Tend Your Children While You Attend Conferences On Feminist Theory Are, For The Most Part, Poor Women And Women Of Color? What Is The Theory Behind Racist Feminism?

Without Community, There Is No Liberation.

Afraid Is A Country With No Exit Visas.

Because The Machine Will Try To Grind You Into Dust Anyway, Whether Or Not We Speak.

I Want To Live The Rest Of My Life, However Long Or Short, With As Much Sweetness As I Can Decently Manage, Loving All The People I Love, And Doing As Much As I Can Of The Work I Still Have To Do.

It's A Struggle But That's Why We Exist, So That Another Generation Of Lesbians Of Color Will Not Have To Invent Themselves, Or Their History, All Over Again.

If You Come As Softly As Wind Within The Trees You May Hear What I Hear See What Sorrow Sees. If You Come As Lightly As Threading Dew I Will Take You Gladly Nor Ask More Of You. You May Sit Beside Me Silent As A Breath Only Those Who Stay Dead Shall Remember Death. And If You Come I Will Be Silent Nor Speak Harsh Words To You. I Will Not Ask You Why, Now. Or How, Or What You Do. We Shall Sit Here, Softly Beneath Two Different Years And The Rich Earth Between Us Shall Drink Our Tears.

Revolution Is Not A One Time Event.

Women Are Powerful And Dangerous.

I Am On The Cusp Of Change And The Curve Is Shifting Fast.

If I Didn't Define Myself For Myself, I Would Be Crunched Into Other People's Fantasies For Me And Eaten Alive.

Hatred Is The Fury Of Those Who Do Not Share Our Goals, And Its Object Is Death And Destruction. Anger Is A Grief Of Distortions Between Peers, And Its Object Is Change.

For We Have Been Socialized To Respect Fear More Than Our Own Needs For Language And Definition, And While We Wait In Silence For That Final Luxury Of Fearlessness, The Weight Of That Silence Will Choke Us.

I Am Not Only A Casualty, I Am Also A Warrior.

I Am Deliberate And Afraid Of Nothing.

There Are No New Ideas. There Are Only New Ways Of Making Them Felt.

When We Define Ourselves, When I Define Myself, The Place In Which I Am Like You And The Place In Which I Am Not Like You, I'm Not Excluding You From The Joining - I'm Broadening The Joining.

It Is Learning How To Stand Alone, Unpopular And Sometimes Reviled, And How To Make Common Cause With Those Other Identified As Outside The Structures, In Order To Define And Seek A World In Which We Can All Flourish. It Is Learning How To Take Our Differences And Make The Strengths. For The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master's House.

You Will Never Be Able To Defend Your City While Shouting.

Silence Has Never Brought Us Anything Of Worth.

Some Words Live In My Throat Breeding Like Adders. Others Know Sun Seeking Like Gypsies Over My Tongue To Explode Through My Lips

I Am Still Learning - How To Take Joy In All The People I Am, How To Use All My Selves In The Service Of What I Believe, How To Accept When I Fail And Rejoice When I Succeed.

What Are The Words You Do Not Yet Have? What Do You Need To Say? What Are The Tyrannies You Swallow Day By Day And Attempt To Make Your Own, Until You Will Sicken And Die Of Them, Still In Silence.

Anger Is Loaded With Information And Energy.

I Am A Black Feminist. I Mean I Recognize That My Power As Well As My Primary Oppressions Come As A Result Of My Blackness As Well As My Womaness, And Therefore My Struggles On Both Of These Fronts Are Inseparable.

All Writers Have Periods When They Stop Writing, When They Cannot Write, And This Is Always Painful And Terrible Because Writing Is Like Breathing.

Some Problems We Share As Women, Some We Do Not. You [white Women] Fear Your Children Will Grow Up To Join The Patriarchy And Testify Against You; We Fear Our Children Will Be Dragged From A Car And Shot Down In The Street, And You Will Turn Your Backs On The Reasons They Are Dying.

Battling Racism And Battling Heterosexism And Battling Apartheid Share The Same Urgency Inside Me As Battling Cancer.

The Learning Process Is Something You Can Incite, Literally Incite, Like A Riot.

Learning Process

There Are Lesbians, God Knows... If You Came Up Through Lesbian Circles In The Forties And Fifties In New York... Who Were Not Feminist And Would Not Call Themselves Feminists.

When We Create Out Of Our Experiences, As Feminists Of Color, Women Of Color, We Have To Develop Those Structures That Will Present And Circulate Our Culture.

Only By Learning To Live In Harmony With Your Contradictions Can You Keep It All Afloat.

Unless One Lives And Loves In The Trenches, It Is Difficult To Remember That The War Against Dehumanization Is Ceaseless.

Poetry Is The Way We Help Give Name To The Nameless So It Can Be Thought.

Art Is Not Living. It Is The Use Of Living.

Nothing I Accept About Myself Can Be Used Against Me To Diminish Me. I Am Who I Am, Doing What I Came To Do, Acting Upon You Like A Drug Or A Chisel To Remind You Of Your Me-ness, As I Discover You In Myself.

Divide And Conquer Must Become Define And Empower.

Divide And Conquer

Even The Smallest Victory Is Never To Be Taken For Granted. Each Victory Must Be Applauded.

Next Time, Ask: What's The Worst That Will Happen? Then Push Yourself A Little Further Than You Dare.

Women Empowerment

...and That Visibility Which Makes Us Most Vulnerable Is That Which Also Is The Source Of Our Greatest Strength.

Poetry Is Not A Luxury.

To That Piece In Each Of Us That Refuses To Be Silent.

Whenever A Conscious Black Woman Raises Her Voice On Issues Central To Her Existence, Somebody Is Going To Call Her Strident, Because They Don't Want To Hear About It, Nor Us. I Refuse To Be Silenced And I Refuse To Be Trivialized, Even If I Do Not Say What I Have To Say Perfectly.

The Quality Of Light By Which We Scrutinize Our Lives Has Direct Bearing Upon The Product Which We Live, And Upon The Changes Which We Hope To Bring About Through Those Lives.

What I Most Regretted Were My Silences. Of What Had I Ever Been Afraid?

In Other Words, I Would Be Giving In To A Myth Of Sameness Which I Think Can Destroy Us.

… Our Sons Must Become Men – Such Men As We Hope Our Daughters, Born And Unborn, Will Be Pleased To Live Among. Our Sons Will Not Grow Into Women. Their Way Is More Difficult Than That Of Our Daughters, For They Must Move Away From Us, Without Us. Hopefully Ours Have What They Have Learned From Us, And A Howness To Forge Into Their Own Image.

I Am Very, Very Happy For Alice Walker.

I Have No Creative Use For Guilt, Yours Or My Own. Guilt Is Only Another Way Of Avoiding Informed Action, Of Buying Time Out Of The Pressing Need To Make Clear Choices, Out Of The Approaching Storm That Can Feed The Earth As Well As Bend The Trees.

What Woman Here Is So Enamored Of Her Own Oppression That She Cannot See Her Heel Print Upon Another Woman's Face?

Institutionalized Rejection Of Differences Is An Absolute Necessity In A Profit Economy Which Needs Outsiders As Surplus People. As Members Of Such An Economy, We Have All Been Programmed To Respond To The Human Differences Between Us With Fear And Loathing And To Handle That Difference In One Of Three Ways: Ignore It, And If That Is Not Possible, Copy It If We Think It Is Dominant, Or Destroy It If We Think It Is Subordinate.

Who I Am Is What Fulfills Me And Fulfills The Vision I Have Of The World.

It's Possible To Take That As A Personal Metaphor And Then Multiply It To A People, A Race, A Sex, A Time. If We Can Keep This Thing Going Long Enough, If We Can Survive And Teach What We Know, We'll Make It.

The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master's House.

We Must Constantly Encourage Ourselves And Each Other To Attempt The Heretical Actions That Our Dreams Imply And So Many Of Our Old Ideas Disparage.

We Are Powerful Because We Have Survived

When I Dare To Be Powerful - To Use My Strength In The Service Of My Vision, Then It Becomes Less And Less Important Whether I Am Afraid.

I Know The Anger Lies Inside Of Me Like I Know The Beat Of My Heart And The Taste Of My Spit. It Is Easier To Be Furious Than To Be Yearning. Easier To Crucify Myself In You Than To Take On The Threatening Universe Of Whiteness By Admitting That We Are Worth Wanting Each Other.

As We Come To Know, Accept, And Explore Our Feelings, They Will Become Sanctuaries And Fortresses And Spawning Grounds For The Most Radical And Daring Of Ideas-the House Of Difference So Necessary To Change And The Conceptualization Of Any Meaningful Action.

Women On Trains Have A Life That Is Exactly Livable The Precision Of Days Flashing Past

Institutionalized Rejection Of Difference Is An Absolute Necessity In A Profit Economy Which Needs Outsiders As Surplus People.

Attend Me, Hold Me In Your Muscular Flowering Arms, Protect Me From Throwing Any Part Of Myself Away.

For The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House. They May Allow Us To Temporarily Beat Him At His Own Game, But They Will Never Enable Us To Bring About Genuine Change. Racism And Homophobia Are Real Conditions Of All Our Lives In This Place And Time. I Urge Each One Of Us Here To Reach Down Into That Deep Place Of Knowledge Inside Herself And Touch That Terror And Loathing Of Any Difference That Lives Here. See Whose Face It Wears. Then The Personal As The Political Can Begin To Illuminate All Our Choices.

If You Do Not Learn To Hate You Will Never Be Lonely Enough To Love Easily Nor Will You Always Be Brave, Although It Does Not Grow Any Easier. Do Not Pretend To Convenient Beliefs, Even When They Are Righteous; You Will Never Be Able To Defend Your City While Shouting.

The True Focus Of Revolutionary Change Is Never Merely The Oppressive Situations That We Seek To Escape, But That Piece Of The Oppressor Which Is Planted Deep Within Each Of Us.

So It Is Better To Speak, Remembering We Were Never Meant To Survive.

The Sharing Of Joy, Whether Physical, Emotional, Psychic, Or Intellectual, Forms A Bridge Between The Sharers Which Can Be The Basis For Understanding Much Of What Is Not Shared Between Them, And Lessens The Threat Of Their Difference.

Some Women Wait For Themselves Around The Next Corner And Call The Empty Spot Peace But The Opposite Of Living Is Only Not Living And The Stars Do Not Care.

The Oppression Of Women Knows No Ethnic Nor Racial Boundaries, True, But That Does Not Mean It Is Identical Within Those Boundaries.

If Our History Has Taught Us Anything, It Is That Action For Change Directed Against The External Conditions Of Our Oppressions Is Not Enough.

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.

The Fear Of Death Is That You Are Dying Too Soon. Nobody Wants To, But At The Point That You Die You Can Pray That You Are No Longer The Same Person. I Pray That When I Am About To Die I Will Not Be The Same Person That I Am Now.

There Are Many Lesbians And Gay Men Trapped By Their Fear Into Silence And Invisibility, And They Exist In A Dim Valley Of Terror Wearing Nooses Of Conformity.

Well, I Do Not Want To Be Tolerated, Nor Misnamed. I Want To Be Recognized.

I Cannot Shut You Out The Way I Shut The Others Out, So Maybe I Can Destroy You. Must Destroy You?

My Fullest Concentration Of Energy Is Available To Me Only When I Integrate All The Parts Of Who I Am, Openly, Allowing Power From Particular Sources Of My Living To Flow Back And Forth Freely Through All My Different Selves, Without The Restriction Of Externally Imposed Definition.

I Am A Black Lesbian Feminist Warrior Poet Mother, Stronger For All My Identities, And I Am Indivisible.

It Is Not The Destiny Of Black America To Repeat White America's Mistakes. But We Will, If We Mistake The Trappings Of Success In A Sick Society For The Signs Of A Meaningful Life.

I Cannot Afford To Believe That Freedom From Intolerance Is The Right Of Only One Particular Group. And I Cannot Afford To Choose Between The Fronts Upon Which I Must Battle These Forces Of Discrimination, Wherever They Appear To Destroy Me. And When They Appear To Destroy Me, It Will Not Be Long Before They Appear To Destroy You.

I Am A Bleak Heroism Of Words That Refuse To Be Buried Alive With The Liars.

In The Recognition Of Loving Lies The Answer To Despair.

Differences Must Be Not Merely Tolerated, But Seen As A Fund Of Necessary Polarities Between Which Our Creativity Can Spark Like A Dialectic.

I Train Myself For Triumph By Knowing It Is Mine No Matter What.

I Have Come To Believe Over And Over Again That What Is Most Important To Me Must Be Spoken, Made Verbal And Shared, Even At The Risk Of Having It Bruised Or Misunderstood.

Sometimes We Are Blessed With Being Able To Choose The Time, And The Arena, And The Manner Of Our Revolution, But More Usually We Must Do Battle Where We Are Standing.

Of All The Art Forms, Poetry Is The Most Economical. It Is The One Which Is The Most Secret, Which Requires The Least Physical Labor, The Least Material, And The One Which Can Be Done Between Shifts, In The Hospital Pantry, On The Subway, And On Scraps Of Surplus Paper. ... Poetry Has Been The Major Voice Of Poor, Working Class, And Colored Women. A Room Of One's Own May Be A Necessity For Writing Prose, But So Are Reams Of Paper, A Typewriter, And Plenty Of Time.

Those Of Us Who Stand Outside The Circle Of This Society's Definition Of Acceptable Women; Those Of Us Who Have Been Forged In The Crucibles Of Difference - Those Of Us Who Are Poor, Who Are Lesbians, Who Are Black, Who Are Older - Know That Survival Is Not An Academic Skill...for The Master's Tools Will Not Dismantle The Master's House. They Will Never Allow Us To Bring About Genuine Change.

I Remember How Being Young And Black And Gay And Lonely Felt. A Lot Of It Was Fine, Feeling I Had The Truth And The Light And The Key, But A Lot Of It Was Purely Hell.

The Strongest Lesson I Can Teach My Son Is The Same Lesson I Teach My Daughter: How To Be Who He Wishes To Be For Himself.

I Stand Here As A Black Lesbian Feminist, Having Been Invited To Comment Within The Only Panel At This Conference Where The Input Of Black Feminists And Lesbians Is Represented. What This Says About The Vision Of This Conference Is Sad, In A Country Where Racism, Sexism And Homophobia Are Inseparable. . . .

Heterosexuality Is

I Write For Those Women Who Do Not Speak, For Those Who Do Not Have A Voice Because They Were So Terrified, Because We Are Taught To Respect Fear More Than Ourselves. We've Been Taught That Silence Would Save Us, But It Won't.

We Have Been Raised To Fear The Yes Within Ourselves, Our Deepest Cravings.

Pain Is Important: How We Evade It, How We Succumb To It, How We Deal With It, How We Transcend It. ... Pain Will Always Either Change Or Stop. Always. ... The Confidence That It Will Change Is What Makes Bearing It Possible. So Pain Is Fluid. It Is Only When You Conceive Of It As Something Static That It Is Unbearable.

Hatred Is A Death Wish For The Hated, Not A Life Wish For Anything Else.

I Have A Duty To Speak The Truth As I See It And Share Not Just My Triumphs, Not Just The Things That Felt Good, But The Pain, The Intense, Often Unmitigated Pain. It Is Important To Share How I Know Survival Is Survival And Not Just A Walk Throught The Rain.

Part Of The Lesbian Consciousness Is An Absolute Recognition Of The Erotic Within Our Lives And, Taking That A Step Further, Dealing With The Erotic Not Only In Sexual Terms.

Anger Is An Appropriate Reaction To Racist Attitudes, As Is Fury When The Actions Arising From Those Attitudes Do Not Change.

I Have Suckled The Wolf's Lip Of Anger And I Have Used It For Illumination, Laughter, Protection, Fire In Places Where There Was No Light, No Food, No Sisters, No Quarter.

And Where The Words Of Women Are Crying To Be Heard, We Must Each Of Us Recognize Our Responsibility To Seek Those Words Out, To Read Them And Share Them And Examine Them In Their Pertinence To Our Lives.

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. 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.

Guilt Is Not A Response To Anger; It Is A Response To One’s Own Actions Or Lack Of Action. If It Leads To Change Then It Can Be Useful, Since It Is Then No Longer Guilt But The Beginning Of Knowledge. Yet All Too Often, Guilt Is Just Another Name For Impotence, For Defensiveness Destructive Of Communication; It Becomes A Device To Protect Ignorance And The Continuation Of Things The Way They Are, The Ultimate Protection For Changelessness.

Raising Black Children-female And Male-in The Mouth Of A Racist, Sexist, Suicidal Dragon Is Perilous And Chancy. If They Cannot Love And Resist At The Same Time, They Will Probably Not Survive.

From My Membership In All Of These Groups I Have Learned That Oppression And The Intolerance Of Difference Come In All Shapes And Sizes And Colors And Sexualities; And That Among Those Of Us Who Share The Goals Of Liberation And A Workable Future For Our Children, There Can Be No Hierarchies Of Oppression.

Those Of Us Forged In The Crucibles Of Difference Know That Survival Is Not An Academic Skill.

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 So It Is Better To Speak Remembering We Were Never Meant To Survive

Difference Is That Raw And Powerful Connection From Which Our Personal Power Is Forged... We Have Been Taught To Either Ignore Our Differences Or To View Them As Causes For Separation And Suspicion Rather Than As Forces For Change. Without Community, There Is No Liberation, Only The Most Vulnerable And Temporary Armistice Between An Individual And Her Oppression... Survival Is Learning To Take Our Difference And Make Them Strengths.

Tomorrow Belongs To Those Of Us Who Conceive Of It As Belonging To Everyone; Who Lend The Best Of Ourselves To It, And With Joy.

For Those Of Us Who Write, It Is Necessary To Scrutinize Not Only The Truth Of What We Speak, But The Truth Of That Language By Which We Speak It.

For Women, The Need And Desire To Nurture Each Other Is Not Pathological But Redemptive, And It Is Within That Knowledge That Our Real Power Is Rediscovered. It Is This Real Connection, Which Is So Feared By A Patriarchal World.

Black Writers, Of Whatever Quality, Who Step Outside The Pale Of What Black Writers Are Supposed To Write About, Or Who Black Writers Are Supposed To Be, Are Condemned To Silences In Black Literary Circles That Are As Total And As Destructive As Any Imposed By Racism.

Without Community, There Is No Liberation...but Community Must Not Mean A Shedding Of Our Differences, Nor The Pathetic Pretense That These Differences Do Not Exist.

To Face The Realities Of Our Lives Is Not A Reason For Despair-despair Is A Tool Of Your Enemies. Facing The Realities Of Our Lives Gives Us Motivation For Action. For You Are Not Powerless... You Know Why The Hard Questions Must Be Asked. It Is Not Altruism, It Is Self-preservation-survival.

I Find I Am Constantly Being Encouraged To Pluck Out Some One Aspect Of Myself And Present This As The Meaningful Whole, Eclipsing Or Denying The Other Parts Of Self.

What You Hear In My Voice Is Fury, Not Suffering. Anger, Not Moral Authority

What Do We Want From Each Other After We Have Told Our Stories

The Erotic Is A Measure Between The Beginnings Of Our Sense Of Self And The Chaos Of Our Strongest Feelings.

The Sixties Were Characterized By A Heady Belief In Instantaneous Solutions.

I Realize That If I Wait Until I Am No Longer Afraid To Act, Write, Speak, Be, I'll Be Sending Messages On A Ouija Board, Cryptic Complaints From The Other Side

I Am Not Free While Any Woman Is Unfree, Even When Her Shackles Are Very Different From My Own.

We Have Too Often Been Expected To Speak All Things To All People And Speak Everyone Else's Position But Our Own.

We Must Wake Up Knowing We Have Work To Do And Go To Bed Knowing We've Done It.

There's Always Someone Asking You To Underline One Piece Of Yourself - Whether It's Black, Woman, Mother, Dyke, Teacher, Etc. - Because That's The Piece That They Need To Key In To. They Want To Dismiss Everything Else.

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. . . .

I Am Black Because I Come From The Earth's Inside Now Take My Word For Jewel In The Open Light.

Life Is Very Short And What We Have To Do Must Be Done In The Now.

Every Black Woman In America Lives Her Life Somewhere Along A Wide Curve Of Ancient And Unexpressed Angers.

But The Question Is A Matter Of The Survival And The Teaching. That's What Our Work Comes Down To. No Matter Where We Key Into It, It's The Same Work, Just Different Pieces Of Ourselves Doing It.

I Have Come To Believe That Caring For Myself Is Not Self-indulgent. Caring For Myself Is An Act Of Survival.

Sadomasochism Is An Institutionalized Celebration Of Dominant/subordinate Relationships. And, It Prepares Us Either To Accept Subordination Or To Enforce Dominance. Even In Play, To Affirm That The Exertion Of Power Over Powerlessness Is Erotic, Is Empowering, Is To Set The Emotional And Social Stage For The Continuation Of That Relationship, Politically, Socially, And Economically.

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Bruce Feirstein

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