The Desert

The desert is where the speaker of Lorde’s “Power” finds herself, after meditating on the differences between poetry and rhetoric in the first stanza. It is a parched, empty landscape, where people in it must fight for survival and nourishment, even resorting to harming each other. The “desert of raw gunshot wounds” (5) could refer to how the desert itself is compared to a body that has sustained multiple wounds. It could also refer to the actual human bodies that have been killed within this “desert.” Furthermore, the speaker is unable to find any nourishment, and can only think of “the wetness” of the dead child’s “blood” (14) if she wants to survive. But even that blood that represents her sole hope of survival is elusive, “as it sinks into the whiteness / of the desert” (15-6). The color of “whiteness” here suggests white supremacy. The implication is...