Life & Wisdom Quote by Audre Lorde

Desire enters here like a demand and a diagnosis. Lorde doesn’t ask to be loved in the vague, flattering way that lets everyone stay abstract; she asks to be attended, held, protected from her own learned self-erasure. The phrase “muscular flowering arms” is the hinge: “muscular” insists on strength, capacity, and the reality of bodies; “flowering” refuses the old split between softness and power. She’s imagining an embrace that is both shelter and growth, a kind of intimacy that doesn’t domesticate her but helps her expand.

The subtext is political because, for Lorde, the personal is never merely private. “Protect me from throwing any part of myself away” points to survival strategies forged under racism, sexism, homophobia: the habitual trimming of self to fit a room, a relationship, a nation that punishes fullness. She’s naming the violence of assimilation as something that can become internal, a reflex that feels like choice. The lover (or beloved community) is enlisted as witness and guardrail, someone strong enough to hold the whole person steady while the world pressures her to edit.

It works because it’s vulnerable without being passive. “Attend me” has the cadence of invocation, almost liturgical, but the stakes are intimate and immediate: don’t let me disappear inside my own compromises. Lorde’s erotic is not decorative; it’s an engine for integrity, a blueprint for care that treats wholeness as a practice, not a slogan.