Their work as poets and activists help create diverse and inclusive communities. They knew struggle, but more importantly, they knew joy. But Murray and Lorde and June Jordan (throwing up all the Black queer women here) left us with tools, not only of resistance, but persistence. The segregated, homophobic, and misogynistic world that Murray grew up in, and later Lorde encountered, as we can now see in those who now hold political power in this cultural moment, continues. What happens when we have that power - when our ideas, our programs, our voices are central to the discourse, not adjacent or alternative to? How are we to be different? We need to think about power just a bit differently. Dwelling in the house of rage leaves the inhabitants scarred, wounded, exhausted. While Lorde offers us an armor of anger, we need, as Murray’s poem requests, our songs and we need to be able to sing them. Life in these United States demanded her warrior heart, her poet’s mind. Too often, our days start and end with presentiments of violence carried out by agents of the state: police officers, ICE agents, et al. The poem ends in a presentiment of violence. But then, you re-read them, and find yourself twisting and turning in the center of the hurricane’s eye. What a stark paradox she sets up (which is poetry, which is rhetoric) and why suicide or murder? Her anguish, her anger crystallized into poems that at first glance seem understandable (or as my students would say “relatable”). Those words start one of Audre Lorde’s most difficult poems, “Power.” As with Murray, Lorde honed a poetics that explored the harshest realities in our society.

The difference between poetry and rhetoric That 8th section ends “Give me a song of hope and love/And a brown girl’s heart to hear it.” Her struggle against racism and sexism, what she named “Jane Crow,” is one of the reasons we can come together and consider how to make change in a truly awful period in this nation’s history, indeed around the globe. Hope is a song in the weary throat” are lines from her signature poem “Dark Testament,” written during the height of the Depression. “Hope is a bird’s wing/broken by a stone. . . . Recently, I learned of the powerful life and poignant poetry of Pauli Murray, a Black Lesbian activist, lawyer, co-founder of NOW, and one the first ordained women priest in the Episcopal Church.

As we take the time to reflect on the past year, it is important to remember works that we are proud of. Back in October, Patricia Spears-Jones, BEI Senior Fellow, had an article in Electronic Lit entitled “The Poetry of Black Women Shows Us How to Move Forward”.

Hope is a song in a weary throat