Those of us forged in the crucibles of difference know that survival is not an academic skill.
I train myself for triumph by knowing it is mine no matter what.
I am Black because I come from the earth’s inside now take my word for jewel in the open light.
Women on trains have a life that is exactly livable the precision of days flashing past.
The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children.
Poetry is not a luxury.
Attend me, hold me in your muscular flowering arms, protect me from throwing any part of myself away.
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.
It does not pay to cherish symbols when the substance lies so close at hand.
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.
If they cannot love and resist at the same time, they probably will not survive.
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?
Out of my flesh that hungers and my mouth that knows comes the shape I am seeking for reason.
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.
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.
Black women sharing close ties with each other, politically or emotionally, are not the enemies of Black men.
I can’t really define it in sexual terms alone although our sexuality is so energizing why not enjoy it too?
In other words, I would be giving in to a myth of sameness which I think can destroy us.
The sixties were characterized by a heady belief in instantaneous solutions.
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.