Time & Perspective Quote by Audre Lorde

Lorde refuses to let poetry be treated as aesthetic garnish. She yokes it to load-bearing structure: "skeleton architecture". That phrase is doing double duty. Skeleton means what holds you up when everything soft has been stripped away; architecture means design with intention, not accidental self-expression. In Lorde's hands, poetry becomes both the frame of survival and the blueprint for agency.

The subtext is a rebuke to any culture that politely applauds art while starving the people who make it, especially Black women and queer writers whose interior lives are routinely dismissed as "personal". Lorde insists the inner world is not a retreat from politics but its precondition. Dreams and visions matter, she grants, but not as escapism. They are the raw material for building something that can withstand pressure: the capacity to name what you feel, then share it, then act.

"Foundations for a future of change" signals poetry as rehearsal space for transformation. Before laws shift or movements cohere, language has to expand; you have to be able to imagine a self and a society that don't yet have official vocabulary. The "bridge across our fears of what has never been before" captures the real obstacle to change: not ignorance, but dread. Poetry becomes a technology for crossing that gap, making the unknown less monstrous by giving it shape and rhythm.

Context matters: Lorde wrote and spoke in the thick of feminist, civil rights, and queer liberation struggles, where being heard was itself a fight. This line is a manifesto for why art is not separate from liberation work; it's the scaffolding that lets the future stand.