June Jordan

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 assertion: "At the risk of appearing ridiculous . . . the true revolutionary is moved by great feelings of love." I think also of Paul Nizan: "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 back: 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

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