But in this 1978 poem, Lorde explores her feelings towards her own mother. In some of the earlier poems on this list, Audre Lorde addresses her attitudes towards motherhood. And like her other work, ‘Afterimages’ is a poem written in the hope of reaching her readers and bringing to light a shared experience, especially among Black women. This powerful poem, published in 1982, addresses some of the darkest moments in US history pertaining to race relations, including the murder of the 14-year-old African-American boy Emmett Till in 1955.Īs elsewhere in her work, Lorde does not shy away from the harrowing aspects of this history, combining the personal with the political and using visceral imagery to put across the horrors of it. This 1978 poem is perhaps Lorde’s most consummate expression of teenage angst: the speaker is a 14-year-old girl who feels unhappy in her own skin, is in love with a boy who isn’t right for her, and isn’t sure if she’ll survive the night.Ī recurring refrain here is the speaker’s mother being in her bedroom with the door closed: this is a teenage girl struggling towards independence, and filled with the neuroticism and anxiety which plagues so many of our lives during those difficult years of adolescence. However, this poem is also about love and desire, as the second stanza takes the poem into more sensual territory, and with its references to transgressive love (Lorde herself was a lesbian at a time when it was hard to speak openly about such things), the poem becomes one of Lorde’s most tender poems about love.

Audre lorde the black unicorn poems