Poem for Audre Lorde
By asha bandele
Author’s note: Audre Lorde was my teacher and my mentor. This poem, written two years after her transition into the Spirit world, is an edited version of a piece that initially appeared in my first book, Absence in the Palms of My Hands, which was dedicated to Audre.
Audre Lorde
copyright Dagmar Schultz
Sometimes I still see you
BlackUnicorn riding the edge of the wind
Head tilted upward
And eyes speaking deliberate truth
You were the last one who should have left us
Audre
Us
Your angry children
Disguising our silence
With gangsta lyrics
That shred our souls into a million pieces of broken history
That chokes in the throats of our mothers
The ones who left us a legacy of honor we do not serve
With our current retrograde labor
Leaving all us us
Everyone
Blind, begging
From the hungriest place in our spirits for
Real poetry!
Real music!
Real art!
Real culture!
Real, real us Blackpeople whose lives are testimonials
Proving
We’re more than trigger fingers on Israeli made submachine guns!
We’re more than I beat my bitch with a bat!
We’re even more than fly-ass synthesized sounds and drum machines!
We’re live music
Big oversize bass muthafuckas
We dimensional we deep
We complicated Coltrane configurations only God understands
We got things to say
Relevant points to make
Urgent issues to raise
Audre!
Come back
In whatever form you choose
And remind us of us in us
Remind us of the Last Poets in us
Remind of the Sonia Sanchez the Gwendolyn Brooks the Zora Neale Hurston Lorraine Hansberry Margaret Walker Jayne Cortez Lucille Clifton
In us
Remind us of the James Baldwin the Paul Laurence Dunbar the Langston Hughes The Claude NcKay the Amiri Baraka the Haki Maduhubuti the Larry Neal
In Us
And the Letta Nealys the Pamela Sneed the Tony Medinas the jessica Care moore
In us
The Voodoo Rain
In us
The Boys on the Boulevard
In us
Audre!
Remind us of the homegirl in us
Remind us of the steel drum the conga the 3-chord Mississippi sound in us
(DA-DA-DA-DA)
That deep feeling Muddy Water way down low in Big Mama Thornton throaty blues In us
The breaking free no more ball and chain
In us
The come on and rock me all night long
In us
Remind us of the freedom codes in slave songs
In us
Remind us of the movement
In us
The toi toi, the capoeira, the lindy, the last dance, the float-like-a-butterfly-sting-like -a-bee, 200-meter-dash, long distance run, Black star express
Reach out and touch somebody’s hand
In us
And the science in us
The social progression, the sincerity in us which is
Remind us of the
You in Us
Audre
Remind us of the Universe
In us
The Universe is in us
The Universe
Is
Us.
__________________________
asha bandele
asha bandele is a poet, journalist, and an award-winning memoirist and novelist. An advocate for children and against mass criminalization, asha lives in Brooklyn with her incredible daughter, Nisa, and is working on her sixth book, a novel.
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