Poetry Is Not a Luxury (1985) | Audre Lorde
…poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives…
…If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is a luxury, then we have given up the core-the fountain-of our power… (we) give up the future of our worlds.
https://www.centralsynagogue.org/worship/sermons/detail/mah-tovu-a-song-in-a-weary-throat
Ma Tovu – How beautiful you are and how beautiful your life will become. How good is the family you have and the family you will make. How powerful are the trailblazers and the pioneers like Audre Lorde and Pauli Murray, Harvey Milk and Martha P. Johnson. The generations before you on whose shoulders you stand. How inspiring are the stories you will read and the stories you will tell. How precious are the friends you have and the life-giving friendships you will create…What you see as a curse will become your greatest source of blessing…
…It’s no accident that Balaam’s blessing was framed as poetry because poetry draws from the power of imagination. It offers us an alternative way of seeing. It shows us a world that looks different from the one that’s before us. It shows us a despised people lifted up to dignity, stronger than it ever suspected, enduring through the ages. It can show a lonely teenager new possibilities for the future, a better life that lies ahead: a way of embracing and loving your own perfect self. It can give all of us a vision of the way the world could be, and the power to keep fighting to bring that world about. It offers us the precious power of change and transformation.
So tonight along with Balaam’s ancient words, I offer contemporary words of blessing and poetry, resilience and resistance from the great Pauli Murray. May they inspire us to keep fighting and to know that the stakes in this battle are no less than life and death.
Hope is a song in a weary throat.
Give me a song of hope
And a world where I can sing it.
Give me a song of faith
And a people to believe in it.
Give me a song of kindliness
And a country where I can live it.
(Give me a song of hope and love
And a brown girl’s heart to hear it.)
Tho our throats may be weary, let us whisper and shout words of blessing, words of pride into the world. Let us drown out the curses. Ma Tovu: how beautiful we are. How beautiful you are.
I Want To Live
“I want to live
the rest of my life,
however long or short,
with as much sweetness
as I can decently manage,
loving all the people I love,
and doing as much as I can
of the work I still have to do.
I am going to write fire
until it comes out of my ears,
my eyes, my noseholes-everywhere.
Until it’s every breath I breathe.
I’m going to go out like a fucking meteor!”
– Audre Lorde
