Harvard lectures on the revival of learning Book

I didn't love this the way I thought I would, if that makes sense. I've read Lorde's work before, but I never sat down and read a book of her poetry, cover-to-cover. After a while they all seemed to be the same poem, and they were so heavy with metaphor that I often didn't know what she was trying to say.

These are some of my favorites:

The Dozens
Nothing says that you must
see me in the street
with us so close together at that red light
that a blind man could have smelled his grocer'
and nothing says that you must
say hello
as we pass in the street,
but we have known each other too well
in the dark
for this,
and it hurts me when you do not speak.

And no one you were with was quite so fine
that I won't remember this and
suffer you in turn and
in my own fashion which is certainly
not in the street.
For I can count on my telephone
ringing some evening and you
exploding into my room through the receiver
kissing and licking my ear....

I hope you will learn your thing
at least
from some of those spiteless noseless
people who surround you
before the centipede in you
runs out of worlds
one for each foot.


Sowing
It is the sink of the afternoon
the children asleep or weary.
I have finished planting the tomatoes
in this brief sun after four days of rain
brown earth under my fingernails
honey-thick sun on the back of my neck
the tips of my fingers are stinging
from the rich earth
but more so from the lack
of your body.

I have been to this place before
blood seething commanded
my fingers fresh from the earth
dream of a furrow
whose name should be you.


Change of Season
Am I to be cursed forever with becoming
somebody else on the way to myself?

Walking backward I fall into summers
behind me salt with wanting
lovers or friends a job wider shoes
a cool drink something to bite into freshness
place to hide out of the rain
out of the shifting melange of seasons
where cruel boys I chased
and their skinny dodgeball sisters
flamed and died in becoming
the brown autumn
left in search of who tore the streamers down
at graduation …


Who Said It Was Simple
There are so many roots to the tree of anger
that sometimes the branches shatter
before they bear.

Sitting in Nedicks
the women rally before they march
discussing the problematic girls
they hire to make them free.
An almost white counterman passes
a waiting brother to serve them first
and the ladies neither notice nor reject
the slighter pleasures of their slavery.
But I who am bound by my mirror
as well as my bed
see causes in color
as well as sex

and sit here wondering
which me will survive
all these liberations.