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Poem for Audre Lorde – The Feminist Wire

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

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

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.