There is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love. - Audre Lorde

I was one of the ones who didn’t really hear Malcolm’s voice until it was amplified by death. I had been guilty of what many of us are still guilty of — letting the media, and I don’t mean only the white media — define the bearers of those messages most important to our lives. When I read Malcolm X with careful attention, I found a man much closer to the complexities of real change than anything I had read before.

We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it.

As a people, we most certainly must work together.