Silence Has Never Brought Us Anything Of

For Within Livin Structures Defined By Profit, By Linear Power, By Institutional Dehumanization, Our Feelings Were Not Meant To Survive. Kept Around As Unavoidable Adjuncts Or Pleasant Pastimes, Our Feelings Were Expected To Kneel To Thought As Women Were Expected To Kneel To Men. But Women Have Survived. As Poets.

You Cannot Use Someone Else's Fire. You Can Only Use Your Own. And In Order To Do That, You Must First Be Willing To Believe That You Have It.

The Quality Of Light By Which We Scrutinize Our Lives Has Direct Bearing Upon The Product Which We Live, And Upon The Changes Which We Hope To Bring About Through Those Lives. It Is Within This Light That We Form Those Ideas By Which We Pursue Our Magic And Make It Realized. This Is Poetry As Illumination, For It Is Through Poetry That We Give Name To Those Ideas Which Are, Until The Poem, Nameless And Formless-about To Be Birthed, But Already Felt.

The Difference Between Poetry And Rhetoric Is Being Ready To Kill Yourself Instead Of Your Children.

Black Women Sharing Close Ties With Each Other, Politically Or Emotionally, Are Not The Enemies Of Black Men.