When patriarchy dismisses us, it encourages our murderers. When feminist theory dismisses us, it encourages its own demise. - 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.

The white fathers told us, I think therefore I am; and the black mothers in each of us-the poet-whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary awareness and demand, the implementation of that freedom.

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