sunday energy #49

poetry is not a luxury

Today is Audre Lorde’s birthday. She would have been ninety-years-old. Today I lay in bed and read The Cancer Journals, a beautiful and urgent account of her journey with breast cancer and mastectomy.

On February 18, 1980 she writes in her journal:

I am 46 years living today and very pleased to be alive, very glad and very happy. Fear and pain and despair do not disappear. They only become slowly less and less important. Although sometimes I still long for a simple orderly life with a hunger sharp as that sudden vegetarian hunger for meat.

The way these words hit me, over forty-years later, is a kind of magic.