The Speaker

The unnamed speaker, who might be Lorde, is also an artist or writer figure who is trying to understand how to harness her language in a powerful and politically meaningful way. On a meta-textual level, she works this problem out by writing this very poem, “Power.” Within the poem, she meditates on the differences between poetry and rhetoric, and concludes that she must write poetry and refuse rhetoric if she is to turn “the destruction / within me” (43) into something that does not perpetuate further harm. Instead, she produces “magic” (17) – the power to change people’s minds and to alert them to the realities of racial inequality in America.

The Child

There seem to be two different children in this poem. One appears in the second stanza, and is made out to be the “dying son” (19) of the speaker. The other child, who does not appear bodily, is...