As we transition from Black History Month to Women's History Month, the voice of Audre Lorde seems the perfect complement to the moment. Strong, inimitable, resonant. Lorde was a poet and a librarian. She fought for women's rights, for civil rights, and much more, and like many other poets, but in her own way, she blends the personal and the political in her language. What does it mean to be a mother, to look at the world with its seasons, its sensations, its threats and struggles and send your child forth? I share with you here my favorite of Audre Lorde's poems.
What My Child Learns of the Sea
What my child learns of the sea
Of the summer thunder
Of the bewildering riddle that hides at the vortex of spring
She will learn in my twilight
And childlike
Revise every autumn
What my child learns
As her winters fall out of time
Ripened in my own body
To enter her eyes with first light
This is why
More than blood,
Or the milk I have given
One day a strange girl will step
To the back of a mirror
Cutting my ropes
Of sea and thunder and sun.
Of the way she will taste her autumns-
Toast-brittle, or warmer than sleep
And the words she will use for winter
I stand already condemned.
- Audre Lorde
From The First Cities