Audre Lorde's Power

The poem “Power” was written by Audre Lorde in 1974. Audre Lorde was a Caribbean feminist, author, and LGBT and civil rights activist who was born in 1934 and died in 1992 after years of battling cancer. Lorde had her first poem published while she was still in high school, by Seventeen magazine. A majority of Lorde’s early work revolved around her love life and her sexuality as a lesbian. After the civil rights movement, Lorde shifted her focus to more political subjects, using her poetry to make statements on the social issues in the world around her. Lorde wrote “Power” after hearing of the acquittal of officer Thomas Shae in the shooting of Clifford Glover, a 10-year-old African American boy. Lorde uses the poem to express her feelings
In the first stanza, Lorde connects this line to motherhood saying that, to choose poetry is to “kill yourself” while rhetoric is to kill “your children”. Choosing these lines as the first of the poem, set the tone of the rest of the work as one of choosing self-sacrifice or sacrificing the future. This struggle between “poetry and rhetoric” appears again, in the form of the speaker in the desert, with the speaker conflicted over her profound thirst and the desire to drink her “dying sons" blood, once again bring the speaker to the struggle of killing herself or her children. The same conflict reappears in the fourth stanza, in the form of the one black, female juror. In this case the woman was confronted with the same choice of “poetry” or “rhetoric” and at first chose poetry but after being dragged “over the hot coals of four centuries of white male approval” she concedes and ceases sacrificing herself in favor of sacrificing her children. While the woman did not initially surrender, it becomes obvious that after being placed under the intense pressure of eleven white men against her one black woman, the woman willingly gives up her first and only power, “lining her womb own womb with cement to make a graveyard for our children” thus in the speaker’s eyes giving up her power and rights as a
When Lorde describes the desert she utilizes violent and dark imagery to create the scene of an unforgiving and destructive landscape that represents the world in which African American’s live. The woman depicted in the desert can also be depicted as the speaker, or the one black woman who was on the jury in the fourth stanza. The description and idea of the position of the woman could be extended to almost any minority in a place that is built against them. Lorde describes the desert as being composed of two key elements: raw gunshot wounds and whiteness, both elements work to create an image of cities across America as battlegrounds in which African Americans are found defenseless in a white city filled with violence. This stanza brings to light her intense emotions about the murder of the child, in the line “trying to make power out of hatred and destruction” Lorde clearly illustrates her intense anger at this having happened and how she wants to make power out of the hate she has for the officer who committed the murder and the jury who let him walk free that she mentions in the fourth stanza and the “white” desert from the second stanza. The hate that she expresses brings the reader back to the fundamental question of what she should do about her anger and how to change the desert in which this is taking place, which Lorde answers in her final stanza saying that by using her