Lorde uses enjambment consistently throughout "Power." In fact, only a handful of lines actually end with punctuation. Throughout the poem, the lines vary drastically in length: some are as little as one word long, while others cover entire clauses. The frequent, sometimes sudden line breaks determine the rhythm of the poem, which has no consistent form, meter, or rhyme scheme.
At certain moments, Lorde's use of enjambment sets a dramatic and intense tone. By stopping after the word "kill" in line 2, for example, Lorde leaves the reader in momentary suspense, which only increases with the word "yourself" standing alone on the following line:
is being ready to kill
yourself
instead of your children.
Read one way, it seems almost as if the speaker means that the "difference between poetry and rhetoric" is being ready to die by suicide—when in fact, the speaker is talking about self-sacrifice. Moments like these keep the reader engaged, wondering what the speaker really means when she introduces dramatic images.
In the second stanza, the lack of punctuation makes the poem flow quickly and breathlessly. Breaks in the middle of clauses—like between "while" and "my" in lines 11 and 12, or between "whiteness" and "of" in lines 15 and 16—make the speaker seem as if she is gasping, stumbling through her words without any capacity to stop:
churns at the imagined taste while
my mouth splits into dry lips
[...]
as it sinks into the whiteness
of the desert where I am lost
In addition to these influences on tone, Lorde uses enjambment to set apart particularly shocking phrases. For example, "justice had been done" stands alone on line 33, hinting that the speaker finds this notion unbelievable—of course justice hadn't actually been done when Shea was set free. And in lines 43-44, breaking before the words "within me" draws attention back to the speaker's interior self, reminding the reader that she is deeply focused on her emotions and intent on using them to drive her poetry.