POWER
A poem by Audre Lorde
The difference between poetry and rhetoric
is being
ready to kill
yourself
instead of your children.
I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds
and a dead child dragging his shattered black
face off the edge of my sleep
blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders
churns at the imagined taste while
my mouth splits into dry lips
without loyalty or reason
thirsting for the wetness of his blood
as it sinks into the whiteness
of the desert where I am lost
without imagery or magic
trying to make power out of hatred and destruction
trying to heal my dying son with kisses
only the sun will bleach his bones quicker.
The policeman who shot down a 10-year-old in Queens
stood over the boy with his cop shoes in childish blood
and a voice said "Die you little motherfucker" and
there are tapes to prove that. At his trial
this policeman and in his own defense
"I didn’t notice the size or nothing else
only the color." and
there are tapes to prove that, too.
Today that 37-year-old white man with 13 years of police forcing
has been set free
by 11 white men who said they were satisfied
justice had been done
and one black woman who said
"They convinced me" meaning
they had dragged her 4’10" black woman’s frame
over the hot coals of four centuries of white male approval
until she let go the first real power she ever had
and lined her own womb with cement
to make a graveyard for our children.
I have not been able to touch the destruction within me.
But unless I learn to use
the difference between poetry and rhetoric
my power too will run corrupt as poisonous mold
or lie limp and useless as an unconnected wire
and one day I will take my teenaged plug
and connect it to the nearest socket
raping an 85-year-old white woman
who is somebody’s mother
and as I beat her senseless and set a torch to her bed
a greek chorus will be singing in ¾ time
"Poor thing. She never hurt a soul. What beasts they are."
is being
ready to kill
yourself
instead of your children.
I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds
and a dead child dragging his shattered black
face off the edge of my sleep
blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders
churns at the imagined taste while
my mouth splits into dry lips
without loyalty or reason
thirsting for the wetness of his blood
as it sinks into the whiteness
of the desert where I am lost
without imagery or magic
trying to make power out of hatred and destruction
trying to heal my dying son with kisses
only the sun will bleach his bones quicker.
The policeman who shot down a 10-year-old in Queens
stood over the boy with his cop shoes in childish blood
and a voice said "Die you little motherfucker" and
there are tapes to prove that. At his trial
this policeman and in his own defense
"I didn’t notice the size or nothing else
only the color." and
there are tapes to prove that, too.
Today that 37-year-old white man with 13 years of police forcing
has been set free
by 11 white men who said they were satisfied
justice had been done
and one black woman who said
"They convinced me" meaning
they had dragged her 4’10" black woman’s frame
over the hot coals of four centuries of white male approval
until she let go the first real power she ever had
and lined her own womb with cement
to make a graveyard for our children.
I have not been able to touch the destruction within me.
But unless I learn to use
the difference between poetry and rhetoric
my power too will run corrupt as poisonous mold
or lie limp and useless as an unconnected wire
and one day I will take my teenaged plug
and connect it to the nearest socket
raping an 85-year-old white woman
who is somebody’s mother
and as I beat her senseless and set a torch to her bed
a greek chorus will be singing in ¾ time
"Poor thing. She never hurt a soul. What beasts they are."
A Note on Audre Lorde’s “Power”
February 1, 2007
Updated: January 3, 2017
Audre Lorde’s poem examines police brutality and an unjust court system. "Power" refers to the case of a 10-year-old unarmed Black boy named Sean Bell who was killed in 1973 by a racist, violent, lying police officer named Officer Thomas Shea.
The poem contrasts two different types of linguistic power, and two different kinds of speech acts: poetry and rhetoric.
One of the chief forms of rhetoric to which the poem refers may be familiar to contemporary readers. This rhetoric is the nonfiction pap routinely used to create policy and justify violent actions by state actors—the kinds of rhetoric that is trotted out to sully the reputations of unarmed, innocent Blacks after police kill them despite the killing clearly being a particular police officer's fault, and despite the fact that past actions of a Black boy, girl, woman, or man truly never excuse their killing.
Ultimately, Audre Lorde's poem shows that, in contrast to this rhetoric, poetry's imagistic and metaphorical power has the ability to hold all parties involved and implicated in these situations of police brutality culpable.
This includes the violent racist cop.
This includes the system of "police forcing" that creates the conditions for the brutality.
This includes the one Black woman on the jury who joined with the whites to acquit the white police officer who killed the boy.
This includes Black boys who commit crimes against the vulnerable in their neighborhoods.
This includes the speaker of the poem who critiques her own rage and thought process as she contends with the competing themes and allegiances that the poem offers.
It seems that everyone and everything is indicted in the poem's macabre, brutal imagery and metaphors.
Long before our 21st century #BlackLivesMatter movement, poets and activists like Audre Lorde were fighting against the scourge of police brutality against Black Americans.
I do not wish for my words here to be interpreted as a blanket attack against law enforcement, the military, or any powerful state actor charged with using violent force to solve problems.
I have tremendous respect for members of our law enforcement organizations and the military who perform their work with intelligence, consideration, respect, honor, and fairness for all members of the public. I especially honor those that place fair-minded, calm, deescalating and nonviolent tactics at the forefront of their interactions with the public.
We can honor great police-work and military service while also fixing the policies and actions that have often made policing and military systems culpable in the worse forms of brutality and genocide that contemporary life has ever known.
If my memory serves me well, I first heard Audre Lorde read her poem “Power” at an event at Howard University in the late 1980s. While I find it difficult to remember the date of that event, I do remember that she prefaced her reading by saying that the poem referred to what she described as a “still talked about” instance of police misconduct in New York City. I researched the incident and found that Audre Lorde was correct. The instance of police misconduct that gave rise to the poem is indeed still talked about today.
“On April 28, 1973, Clifford Glover, a five-foot, 98-pound 10-year-old, was shot in the back while running away from Officer Thomas Shea in South Jamaica,” says “Suspects as Usually” by Sean Gardiner, a Village Voice from Tuesday, January 2, 2007, which examined the April 28, 1973 incident to which Lorde’s poem responds.
The salacious, bigoted nature of this case of the police killing of a 10-year-old Black boy is infamous. The article goes on to report the following:
“While looking for two people who had robbed a taxi driver, Shea and his partner encountered the boy and his stepfather […] who were heading to the latter's job at a junkyard. Shea contended that as he approached the stepfather and son, the boy fired a shot at him. Shea said he returned fire, striking the boy, who then ran.”
“Before falling, the boy passed the gun off to his father, Shea claimed. Meanwhile, Shea's fellow cops conducted a frenetic parallel investigation. In his book The Trial of Patrolman Thomas Shea, author Thomas Hauser described how "patrolmen from the 103rd Precinct reviewed files at the Queens County Narcotics Bureau in hope of finding Add Armstead, Eloise Glover [the boy's mother], or Clifford Glover mentioned as a suspect."
“Hauser also wrote that police also futilely pursued a tip from an "anonymous source" that "the real Clifford Glover" had died three days after birth and that the child shot by Shea had been shipped to New York by a cousin of Eloise Glover ‘for welfare purposes.’”
“Even after investigators had come up empty for a couple of days, Hauser wrote, a police union trustee urged the ‘investigating’ cops, ‘Keep trying.’ There has to be something out there that will substantiate Shea's story.”
Of course, Officer Shea lied and his fellow police officers and, ultimately, the court system supported him.
“The facts didn't help Shea,” says the article, “Al Gaudelli, who prosecuted the cop for the Queens D.A., told the Voice that no gun was found. Ballistics tests showed that Shea shot the boy "T-square in the back," Gaudelli added.”
“Still, a jury acquitted Shea (though he was later fired from the NYPD because of the incident). The Glover shooting highlights one of the primary reasons that cops pursue parallel investigations: to try to save their jobs. "
“Shea really thought he had the robbers in that cab robbery, but he didn't say that," Gaudelli said. "He knew that under police guidelines the only time you could shoot was if there was imminent fear of deadly force, which there wasn't. So he said, 'I saw they had a pistol,' instead.”
Keep this context in mind as we reflect on Audre Lorde’s poem.
The poem contrasts two different types of linguistic power, and two different kinds of speech acts: poetry and rhetoric.
One of the chief forms of rhetoric to which the poem refers may be familiar to contemporary readers. This rhetoric is the nonfiction pap routinely used to create policy and justify violent actions by state actors—the kinds of rhetoric that is trotted out to sully the reputations of unarmed, innocent Blacks after police kill them despite the killing clearly being a particular police officer's fault, and despite the fact that past actions of a Black boy, girl, woman, or man truly never excuse their killing.
Ultimately, Audre Lorde's poem shows that, in contrast to this rhetoric, poetry's imagistic and metaphorical power has the ability to hold all parties involved and implicated in these situations of police brutality culpable.
This includes the violent racist cop.
This includes the system of "police forcing" that creates the conditions for the brutality.
This includes the one Black woman on the jury who joined with the whites to acquit the white police officer who killed the boy.
This includes Black boys who commit crimes against the vulnerable in their neighborhoods.
This includes the speaker of the poem who critiques her own rage and thought process as she contends with the competing themes and allegiances that the poem offers.
It seems that everyone and everything is indicted in the poem's macabre, brutal imagery and metaphors.
Long before our 21st century #BlackLivesMatter movement, poets and activists like Audre Lorde were fighting against the scourge of police brutality against Black Americans.
I do not wish for my words here to be interpreted as a blanket attack against law enforcement, the military, or any powerful state actor charged with using violent force to solve problems.
I have tremendous respect for members of our law enforcement organizations and the military who perform their work with intelligence, consideration, respect, honor, and fairness for all members of the public. I especially honor those that place fair-minded, calm, deescalating and nonviolent tactics at the forefront of their interactions with the public.
We can honor great police-work and military service while also fixing the policies and actions that have often made policing and military systems culpable in the worse forms of brutality and genocide that contemporary life has ever known.
If my memory serves me well, I first heard Audre Lorde read her poem “Power” at an event at Howard University in the late 1980s. While I find it difficult to remember the date of that event, I do remember that she prefaced her reading by saying that the poem referred to what she described as a “still talked about” instance of police misconduct in New York City. I researched the incident and found that Audre Lorde was correct. The instance of police misconduct that gave rise to the poem is indeed still talked about today.
“On April 28, 1973, Clifford Glover, a five-foot, 98-pound 10-year-old, was shot in the back while running away from Officer Thomas Shea in South Jamaica,” says “Suspects as Usually” by Sean Gardiner, a Village Voice from Tuesday, January 2, 2007, which examined the April 28, 1973 incident to which Lorde’s poem responds.
The salacious, bigoted nature of this case of the police killing of a 10-year-old Black boy is infamous. The article goes on to report the following:
“While looking for two people who had robbed a taxi driver, Shea and his partner encountered the boy and his stepfather […] who were heading to the latter's job at a junkyard. Shea contended that as he approached the stepfather and son, the boy fired a shot at him. Shea said he returned fire, striking the boy, who then ran.”
“Before falling, the boy passed the gun off to his father, Shea claimed. Meanwhile, Shea's fellow cops conducted a frenetic parallel investigation. In his book The Trial of Patrolman Thomas Shea, author Thomas Hauser described how "patrolmen from the 103rd Precinct reviewed files at the Queens County Narcotics Bureau in hope of finding Add Armstead, Eloise Glover [the boy's mother], or Clifford Glover mentioned as a suspect."
“Hauser also wrote that police also futilely pursued a tip from an "anonymous source" that "the real Clifford Glover" had died three days after birth and that the child shot by Shea had been shipped to New York by a cousin of Eloise Glover ‘for welfare purposes.’”
“Even after investigators had come up empty for a couple of days, Hauser wrote, a police union trustee urged the ‘investigating’ cops, ‘Keep trying.’ There has to be something out there that will substantiate Shea's story.”
Of course, Officer Shea lied and his fellow police officers and, ultimately, the court system supported him.
“The facts didn't help Shea,” says the article, “Al Gaudelli, who prosecuted the cop for the Queens D.A., told the Voice that no gun was found. Ballistics tests showed that Shea shot the boy "T-square in the back," Gaudelli added.”
“Still, a jury acquitted Shea (though he was later fired from the NYPD because of the incident). The Glover shooting highlights one of the primary reasons that cops pursue parallel investigations: to try to save their jobs. "
“Shea really thought he had the robbers in that cab robbery, but he didn't say that," Gaudelli said. "He knew that under police guidelines the only time you could shoot was if there was imminent fear of deadly force, which there wasn't. So he said, 'I saw they had a pistol,' instead.”
Keep this context in mind as we reflect on Audre Lorde’s poem.