In a somber yet joyously unified celebration of women's lives, poets Aurde Lorde and Adrienne Rich shared their works to an overflow crowed at Sanders Theater Saturday night.

Lorde's unpublished poem "Need", which addressed the supposed need of men to hurt women, drove home the fears and concerns of the audience. The poet based her devastating work on the true case of a Detroit woman who, while auditioning for a role in a play, was killed with a sledgehammer by its young black author during an argument scene--before the eyes of her four-year-old son. In its final, eloquently angry moment, Lorde repeated the plea and statement, "We cannot live without our lives."

The reading, a benefit for the recently-formed Support Group for Women's Safety, was the second in a series which began Friday night with an evening of black women's poetry at the Solomon Carter Fuller Center in the South End. The first reading, which also drew a standing-room-only crowd, featured the poetry of Lorde and local poets, Fahamisha Shariat Brown, Barbara Smith, Kate Rushin, and Dianna Christmas. Both evenings were supported by a number of community organizations concerned with making Boston safe for all women, including the Black Star Theatre, a Radcliffe-Harvard organization, which procured the space in Sanders.

La Triba, a multi-cultural women's percussion and woodwind ensemble, opened the evening at Sanders with some lively rhythms which set the audience rocking even before everyone was seated. Their spirited performance then and during intermission provided a buoyancy to the more weighty aspects of the evening.

But the main purpose for the gathering was never forgotten. The spirits of thirteen women murdered in Boston this year as well as countless other female victims moved among the audience as it stood for a moment of silence. The brief remembrance was followed by the reading of selected passages from the journal of Barbara Smith, a member of the black feminist Combahee River Collective.

This was in some ways the hardest-hitting part of the program because of itds topicality; Smith's direct references to the series of murders served to sharpen the focus of the other outcries make that night against violence against women. Especially poignant were her musings on the lack of opportunity most black women have to escape the atmosphere of fear--"to get away, and write."

The poetry of Audre Lorde demonstrated the lucid insight of a woman who is able to step back from her situation and observe--but never for too long. Because she, too, is black, feminist, lesbian, and intellectual, her consciousness and anger toward her everyday struggles and those of people like her are always at a high level. As reflected in her poetry, this awareness shocks, devastates, and clears the way for a new order of thought and action in a way the evening news cannot rival.

In a poem mockingly titled "The Evening News," dedicated to exiled struggles of women in America to those of women in Africa. For both, she said, "the question of survival is an ongoing one--not a decision, (but a process)."

Poet Adrienne Rich pickes up this thread and continued with a series of her works from 1964 to 1978 examining "violence, complicity, refusal to complicity, and resistance, from a woman's eye."

Rich told the audience, "I'm here because as a white feminist and a woman-identified woman, I perceive these events in Boston as evidence of the depth of woman-hating." Although she believes if the murdered women had been attached to powerful white men their stories would have "covered the front page of the New York Times," Rich urged the audience that "there is no selective privilege for women."