For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence.
When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.
There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.
When I dare to be powerful – to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.
I have come to believe that caring for myself is not self-indulgent. Caring for myself is an act of survival.
Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.
Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change.
Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change.
My fear of anger taught me nothing.
One pays a lot, we all pay a lot, for awareness.
Somedays, if bitterness were a whetstone, I could be sharp as grief.
Every Black woman in America lives her life somewhere along a wide curve of ancient and unexpressed angers.
For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.
We recognize that all knowledge is mediated through the body and that feeling is a profound source of information about our lives.
I soon discovered that if you keep your mouth shut, people are apt to believe you know everything, and they begin to feel freer and freer to tell you anything, anxious to show that they know something, too.
Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak.
I cannot shut you out the way I shut the others out, so maybe I can destroy you. Must destroy you?
I learned so much from listening to people. And all I knew was, the only thing I had was honesty and openness.
Learning not to crumple before these uncertainties fuels my resolve to print myself upon the texture of each day fully rather than forever.
I am on the cusp of change and the curve is shifting fast.