It’s About You: On the Beach by June Jordan
It’s About You: On the Beach
June JordanYou have
two hands absolutely lean and clean
to let go the gold
the silver flat or plain rock
sand
but hold the purple pieces
atom articles
that glorify a color
yours is orange
oranges are like you love
a promising
a calm skin and a juice
inside
a juice
a running from the desert
Lord
see how you run
YOUR BODY IS A LONG BLACK WING
YOUR BODY IS A LONG BLACK WING
MARGINALIA
1.
Day 07 of The Sealey Challenge. Today’s offering is Haruko/Love Poems by June Jordan.
2.
Reading June Jordan’s work feels like being pulled into a conversation that has already been happening for awhile. Perhaps since always. The vulnerability is bald and blunt, and yet hesitant, too, as if one is tentatively learning the beloved’s gaze.
3.
There is also the unwitting realisation that to love means to experience possible loss—would the ache of that be enough to break you? Would you allow yourself to be held in urgency, in anticipation of the grief?
4.
What does it mean to love if the beloved is both the Other and your self?
5.
What I’m learning from June Jordan is that to love means to care deeply in many directions—I love this body that houses my heart, I love my person who witnesses my life, I love the stranger whose kindness moves the world, I love the world who puts up a resistance against the empire.
6.
These love poems are insistent as they are necessary—they demand my awareness and attention towards hard truths. Just as there is tenderness, there, too, is an exploration of identity, of justice, of personhood. What a treasure it is to have read this book.
KEEP READING
SHARED WITH GRATITUDE
This poem appeared in Haruko / Love Poems by June Jordan, published by Serpent's Tail / High Risk Books, 1994. (Available on: Amazon • Bookshop)
DESCRIPTION
“For Haruko Little moves on sight
blinded by histories
as trivial or expansive
as the rain
seducing light
into a blurred excitement Then
she opens
all of one eye
as accurate as longing
as two hands beholden to the hunger of green leaves and
rinsing them back
into regular breath
she who sees
she frees each of these
beggarly events
cleansing them
of dust and other death Poem about Process
And Progress
For Haruko Hey Baby you betta
hurry it up!
Because
since you went totally
off
I seen a full moon
I seen a half moon
I seen a quarter moon
I seen no moon whatsoever! I seen a equinox
I seen a solstice
I seen Mars and Venus on a line
I seen a mess a fickle stars
and lately
I seen this new kind a luva
on an’ off the telephone
who like to talk to me
all the time real nice Resolution # 1,003 I will love who loves me
I will love as much as I am loved
I will hate who hates me
I will feel nothing for everyone oblivious to me
I will stay indifferent to indifference
I will live hostile to hostility
I will make myself a passionate and eager lover
In response to passionate and eager love I will be nobody’s fool Foreword WHAT IS THIS thing called love, in the poems of June Jordan, artist, teacher, social critic, visionary of human solidarity? First of all, it’s a motive; the power Che Guevara was trying to invoke in his much-quoted “At the risk of appearing ridiculous . . . the true revolutionary is moved by great feelings of love.” I think also of Paul “You think you are innocent if you say, ‘I love this woman and I want to act in accordance with my love,’ but you are beginning the revolution. . . . You will be driven to claim the right to a human act is to attack the forces responsible for all the misery in the world.” Neither of them, admittedly, was claiming the love of a woman for women, the love of a man for men, as revolutionary, as a human act. But the motive is “directed by desire” in Jordan” (Source)
ABOUT JUNE JORDAN
June Jordan was born in New York, New York, on July 9, 1936. Jordan’s numerous books of poetry include The Essential June Jordan (Copper Canyon Press); We’re On: A June Jordan Reader (Alice James Books); Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems (Copper Canyon Press); Kissing God Goodbye: Poems, 1991–1997 (Anchor Books); Naming Our Destiny: New and Selected Poems (Thunder’s Mouth Press); Living Room: New Poems (Thunder’s Mouth Press,); Passion: New Poems, 1977–1980 (Beacon Press);… (more)
Read more poems by June Jordan • Find books by this poet on Amazon • Bookshop • Or view my library
ENDNOTES
- Explore other works in pursuit of: body • wanting • love • Or browse the index
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