Audre Lorde

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Poet, essayist, and novelist Audre Lorde was born on February 18, 1934, in New York City. Lorde received her BA from Hunter College and an MLS from Columbia University. Her first volume of poems, The First Cities, was published in 1968. In 1968 she also became the writer-in-residence at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, where she discovered a love of teaching. The First Cities was quickly followed with Cables to Rage (1970) and From a Land Where Other People Live (1973), which was nominated for a National Book Award. In 1974 she published New York Head Shot and Museum. Whereas much of her earlier work focused on the transience of love, this book marked her most political work to date. In 1976, W. W. Norton released her collection Coal and shortly thereafter published The Black Unicorn. Lorde was diagnosed with cancer and chronicled her struggles in her first prose collection, The Cancer Journals, which won the Gay Caucus Book of the Year award for 1981. Her other prose volumes include Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984), and A Burst of Light (1988), which won a National Book Award. She received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1981. In the 1980s, Lorde and writer Barbara Smith founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. She was also a founding member of Sisters in Support of Sisters in South Africa, an organization that worked to raise concerns about women under apartheid. Audre Lorde was professor of English at John Jay College of criminal justice and Hunter College. She was the poet laureate of New York from 1991-1992. She died of breast cancer in 1992. The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde was published in 1997. Source

The Bees

Spanish translation by Torres Ruiz

 

In the street outside a school

what children learn

possesses them.

 

Three little boys yell

stoning a swarm of bees     caught

between the lunchroom window and a grate

Their furious rocks graze metal.

 

The bees are cold     and slow

to self-defense. One boy is stung

into quicker destruction.

 

School guards come

long wooden sticks in hand

advancing on the hive

they beat the almost finished

rooms of wax apart     fresh honey

drips down their broomsticks

little boy-feet     becoming experts

trample the rain-stunned bees

into the pavement.

 

Curious and apart     the girls

look on in fascination     learning

secret lessons     one steps

across the feebly buzzing ruins

to peer up at the empty grated nook

"We could have studied honey-making!"

tries to understand

her own destruction.

 

Published:

1972

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Black Arts Movement

Civil Rights Movement

Anthology Years:

2025

Themes:

Bilingual

Childhood & Coming of Age

Education & Learning

Nature

Science & Climate

Violence & War

Womanhood

Literary Devices:

Caesura

a break between words within a metrical foot

Dialogue

conversation between two or more people as a feature of a book, play, or movie

Enjambment

a line break interrupting the middle of a phrase which continues on to the next line

Imagery

visually descriptive or figurative language, especially in a literary work

Transferred Epithet

When an adjective usually used to describe one thing is transferred to another.