A Whorl of Poetry

Index of Authors

Our Dead Behind Us

I learned to be honest the way I learned to swim dropped into the inevitable my father's thumbs in my hairless armpits about to give way I am trying to surface carefully remembering the water's shadow-legged musk cannons of salt exploding and for years my powerful breast stroke was a declaration of war. -- "A Question of Climate" Our Dead Behind Us (1986), p. 39.

Links: Four Lorde poems are online here, including "Coal" and "If you come softly". There is a small Lorde page here.

Audre Lorde has written at least the following books:

• Undersong
• The First Cities
• Cables to Rage
• From a Land Where Other People Live
• The New York Head Shop and Museum
• Coal
• Between Our Selves
• The Cancer Journals
• The Black Unicorn
• Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
• Sister Outsider
• Our Dead Behind Us
• A Burst of Light