Audre Lorde's "Echoes"

Audre Lorde’s works were very interesting to me. In particular, the poem “Echoes” stood out to me. In this piece, Lorde uses the metaphor of an echo to compare his life or possible his soul to. The first stanza is very powerful in describing the type of echo Lorde feels a connection with. “There is a timbre of voice that comes from not being heard and knowing you are not being heard…” says to me that Lorde, or possible black society in general, in speaking out but not being accepted clearly and audible. There voices are bounding off the backs of alleys and around street corners instead of in the courtrooms or business halls. Instead, they are heard and remembered for their transgressions (lines 30-32) “being caught making love to a woman I do not know”. One of my favorite lines in in stanza 2, lines 17 & 18, “I am listening in that fine space between desire and always”. The truth and insight behind these words crosses all racial and prestigious boundaries. Every person on earth is searching for the smallest grain of truth between what they want and what they know is eternal. We all are wanting to find ourselves in entirety by seeing something real for the first time. Lorde was trying to say this out loud for the black community. Little did he know that it would one day, 14 years later, be speaking vivdly to all of us. Audre Lorde was highly educated and worked hard to make her place among New Yorks highest intellectuals. It was strange to me that she would write something that had flavors of suffering and being stiffled for so long. Was her voice ever heard clearly? Maybe she could not hear her own voice well enough? That would explain her struggles with her sexual identity.