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

June Jordan was born in Harlem in 1936. Poet, activist, teacher and essayist, she was a prolific, passionate and influential voice for liberation. She published 28 books of poetry, essays, and fiction, was a regular columnist for The Progressive and a prolific writer whose articles appeared in The Village Voice, The New York Times, Ms., Essence, the American Poetry Review, The Nation and many other periodicals. June Jordan died in 2002.