Given the increasingly divisive rhetoric with which we are being bombarded in the U.S., and the resultant racial tension, mass shootings and other violence it inspires, I am reprising this profile of Audre Lorde, a writer whose work I find ever more relevant.

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by NONA BLYTH CLOUD

Writing poetry in reaction to headline news is risky business. Even some of the best poets have written work so momentary about a particular incident it’s glaringly out-of-place in their future collected works.

But when a poet gets it right, that transitory moment is fixed forever in our heads, because the poem connects to a deeper, ongoing feeling of outrage and despair.

Audre Lorde (1934–1992) wrote this poem about the 1973 police killing of 10-year-old Clifford Glover, shot in the back and “dead at the scene,” and the trial that followed. The celebratory words spoken by the shooter, Officer Thomas Shea, and his partner were recorded from their walkie-talkies by the dispatcher. When the precinct commander arrived, he took a look at the dead boy and asked the shooter, “Didn’t you recognize that he was a kid?” Shea’s reply is in Lorde’s poem. After the fact, Shea “thought he had a gun,” which was never found in the massive search that followed.

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Power

The difference between poetry and rhetoric
is being ready to kill
yourself
instead of your children.

I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds
and a dead child dragging his shattered black
face off the edge of my sleep
blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders
is the only liquid for miles
and my stomach
churns at the imagined taste while
my mouth splits into dry lips
without loyalty or reason
thirsting for the wetness of his blood
as it sinks into the whiteness
of the desert where I am lost
without imagery or magic
trying to make power out of hatred and destruction
trying to heal my dying son with kisses
only the sun will bleach his bones quicker.

A policeman who shot down a ten year old in Queens
stood over the boy with his cop shoes in childish blood
and a voice said “Die you little motherfucker” and
there are tapes to prove it. At his trial
this policeman said in his own defense
“I didn’t notice the size nor nothing else
only the color.” And
there are tapes to prove that, too.

Today that 37 year old white man
with 13 years of police forcing
was set free
by eleven white men who said they were satisfied
justice had been done
and one Black Woman who said
“They convinced me” meaning
they had dragged her 4’10” black Woman’s frame
over the hot coals
of four centuries of white male approval
until she let go
the first real power she ever had
and lined her own womb with cement
to make a graveyard for our children.

I have not been able to touch the destruction
within me.
But unless I learn to use
the difference between poetry and rhetoric
my power too will run corrupt as poisonous mold
or lie limp and useless as an unconnected wire
and one day I will take my teenaged plug
and connect it to the nearest socket
raping an 85 year old white woman
who is somebody’s mother
and as I beat her senseless and set a torch to her bed
a greek chorus will be singing in 3/4 time
“Poor thing. She never hurt a soul. What beasts they are.”

Clifford Glover. 1973. The horror-filled history behind “Black Lives Matter” goes back a lot farther than talking heads on a slick news set are likely to tell you, but Power connects us to every dead child splashed in blood-red sound bites on TV, and to all the others killed before there was television, when only a few heard the news and mourned their deaths.
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