Ready

photo by Dagmar Schultz

We Are Ready

A poem by the participants in “The Difference Between Poetry and Rhetoric: Audre Lorde and Using Our Power” after “Power” by Audre Lorde

My power is within my words

My power is my community

My power is my possibility

My power is my radical black feminist lineage

My power is in my queer family

My power is my tender, childlike heart

My power is my voice, even when it trembles, even when it’s shaking

My power is my yes, and my no, and the space in-between

My power is a language of love

My power is in the songs I sing and cherish

My power is my love that gives me courage because I trust my ancestors that walk with me

My power is my feistiness

My power is my faith

My power is my sight

My power is my intimacy as illumination

My power is my desire to love you regardless

My power is trusting in wholeness - in me, in this moment, in you

My power is the reminder that more important than the “what” is the “how”

My power is my imagination

My power is my vulnerability

My power is my giant and my small

My power is my ability to hear the smallest voices, in me and others

My power is hope

My power is my humility

My power is my love of listening with an open heart

My power is in my ability to say the truth

My power is my ability to name and shame state violence

instead of blaming individuals for what the state has done to us

My power is learning to love this land without having to claim it

My power is my clarity

My power is my remembering

My power is trying

My power is my connection to my love

My power is my Black Southern heritage, my ability to rest and fight at the same damn time

My power is my humanity

My power is my refusal

My power is my evil being public domain, co-opted, collective, perpetrator and victim

My power is our entangled roots, always connecting us, always sending bursts of poetry

My power is my spiritual calling to love humanity

My power is my connection to all beings

My power is in my sacred solitude

My power is mine

My power is real

My power is my capacity to hold contradiction

My power is my capacity for love, my soul-deep rage, my embrace of both

My power is feeling my feelings

My power is my connection to spirit

My power is the breath of life

My power is my knowing is my faith is my surrender

My power is yet unknown to me

My power is my love

My power is my love

My power is my listening

My power is my belly

My power is my breath

My power is my uncanny intuition, my big heart,

and my fierce desire to protect my people near and far

My power is my ability to nourish my community

My power is my ancestors who hold me

My power is my Mother, guiding me to the peaks of my values,

so I may see the expansiveness of my Self and feel the winds of her Love

My power is the tenderness of my heart that keeps me present

and refuses to harden or go numb

My power is my heart, broken into a greater wholeness

My power is my connection to the divine

My power is my capacity to feel

My power is being present

My power is in both my tears and my rage and not numbing to either

My power is water medicine, the tears that flow and transcend the limits of words

My power is my creativity, my tenderness, my vision, my loudness, my connectedness to my people - both living and passed

My power is my unrelenting, deep love for the earth and all the living beings within it

My power is the dance that keeps me connected to the earth and all her beings

My power is my learned sensitivity to slowness in relationship to holding that space for others

My power is my joy, my dreams, my energy

My power is my song, my voice, my love

My power is my sexual energy unleashed and expressed

My power is my dead people who want more

My power is my deep knowing

My power is a holy well

My power is my strength

My power is my gentleness

My power is my practice

My power is my art and the endurance and stamina of my love

My power is in resonance , powerful togetherness.

My power is when I’m not my own

My power is my grace even when confronted with rage

My power is colorful, just like my soul

My power is my desire - delight - intuition – curiosity

My power is listening for the memory and medicine I have inherited

in my bones and in my blood

My power is my soul’s love for love

My power is my poetry

My power is my prayer being felt across time and space

My power is to believe

My power is knowing there is another way to be

My power is my love

My power is our power

My power is ready

If you missed the workshop you can still access it here: https://sangodare.podia.com/the-difference-between-poetry-and-rhetoric-audre-lorde-and-using-your-power