For Audre Lorde

What do you say to a poet Whose transition left us uncomfortable among the dead Who you cross a bridge with from an island to a mainland To find your prayer mute before a city's crumbling steeples And could not beyond her skin share the unveiling of desire What do you say to a poet The world shall never see again, words giving sight To the blind cul-de-sac of power? What, if you know what to say? Would you say, would you write images of thought Dissolving your particularity in the mass, like shared sacrement Would go against tradition, and unsubstantiate the self Into bread and blood to feed to feed the coming dread? It is revulsive ... if I forget Africa and all her sacred meanings But I cannot watch beauty fade before I pick a flower It is the paradox that goes against the grain ... the shadow Passed invisibly and left shivering at the stammering door. I talk of shadows and substance in the recovery of essence You carved away the shadow to make an icon of existence And all the while our ladder of faith were words upon a page And it was not only for acceptance, but to know the universal Or to become again what we left so we could hate it more We dancing in our pain, found hope yet in perennial praise While we rose and fell into dust, for in the mortal crust There is always this ambivalence and slipping of the truth What do you tell a sister When she crawls out of your mother's bed into another dawn Who can say to us because we are dust People from a small place are not suppose to have a universal taste For we know brother better every mending of the broken bond Sister, I am from a small island too And all my life we have been fenced by only water While were dismantling the fences that they built in skin We have a porous boundary, many crossroads to sin O but I would bridge me to your world again And carry words like you to shake the bed of many worlds beyond For it is in bringing forth our love that the mask of our virginity falls.