One can see why she stood by the poem: as in all her work, she carefully considers how politics constrains our language, how what we say is “coloured”-a particularly loaded word here-“by who pays what for speaking.” But the poem is also an impassioned affirmation of language’s power, transforming the simple act of speaking, of how “a sound comes into a word,” into a dazzling catalog of metaphors. This gorgeous assertion of identity first appeared in Lorde’s debut book in 1968 eight years later it became the title poem in another book, her first from a large publisher. She later did this through her own writing, refusing to erase or disguise any part of herself, always affirming the multiplicity and idiosyncrasy of her own identity as a Black lesbian and self-described “warrior.” An acute, agile thinker and an artist of encompassing fire, Lorde made her meaning known, a meaning that her readers are just beginning to fully understand.

As she writes in her essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” she saw verse as “vital necessity,” believing that “the farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.” This sense of poetry’s efficacy was itself distilled from her own experience: born to Caribbean immigrants in New York City during the Great Depression, Lorde was nearly blind as a child, and she learned to speak at the same time she learned to read, often describing her feelings by reciting a poem. Known for her radical thought and passionate activism, Audre Lorde was a poet to her core.

Audre lorde the black unicorn poems