II would love to live Like a river flows, Carried by the surprise Of its own unfolding. ~ from Conamara Blues (HarperPerennial, 2004)

We were made to understand it would be
Terrible. Every small want, every niggling urge,
Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind.

Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful
Dream. The worst in us having taken over
And broken the rest utterly down.

                                      A long age
Passed. When at last we knew how little
Would survive us—how little we had mended

Or built that was not now lost—something
Large and old awoke. And then our singing
Brought on a different manner of weather.

Then animals long believed gone crept down
From trees. We took new stock of one another.
We wept to be reminded of such color.

~ from Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018)

We were made to understand it would be
Terrible. Every small want, every niggling urge,
Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind.

Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful
Dream. The worst in us having taken over
And broken the rest utterly down.

                                      A long age
Passed. When at last we knew how little
Would survive us—how little we had mended

Or built that was not now lost—something
Large and old awoke. And then our singing
Brought on a different manner of weather.

Then animals long believed gone crept down
From trees. We took new stock of one another.
We wept to be reminded of such color.

~ from Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018)

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

~ from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (Vintage, 1990)

My son and I sat on the bed of a late half-light
from the hallway slanted across gray walls. 
He spoke of toes and scratches,
and I comforted in the desert tones of our language
we left behind across winter dry plains. 
His brown eyes
alive,
    glowing in the shadows with eternal life,
gaze at me
feeling the sounds of these words
I so seldom speak. 
In this moment caught between languages
    we shared my words
        as if they were secrets
nourished within this half-light. 

~ from No Parole Today (West End Press, 1999)

Breathe, said the wind  

How can I breathe at a time like this,  
when the air is full of the smoke  
of burning tires, burning lives?  

Just breathe, the wind insisted. 

Easy for you to say, if the weight of 
injustice is not wrapped around your throat, 
cutting off all air.  

I need you to breathe.
  

I need you to breathe.  

Don’t tell me to be calm 
when there are so many reasons 
to be angry, so much cause for despair!  

I didn’t say to be calm, said the wind, 
I said to breathe.  

We’re going to need a lot of air 
to make this hurricane together.

~ www.lynnungar.com

Head and hands droop, burning,
a posse hot on the trail.
The sweating bodies fling themselves into
the humid swamps.
How beautifully tough their hearts are.
Doves and mice rest
on their machetes,
like branches,
and the time of the sun,
and of the moon,
and the time of desire
make them reborn like children,
like sweet children of a freedom already won.

    translated by Charles Tarzian

~ from Indispensable October, 1983
and from Black Woman and Other Poems (Mango Publishing 2004)

won't you celebrate with me  
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my one hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.

~ from Book of Light (Copper Canyon Press, 1993)

Dedicated to the Poet Agostinho Neto, President of The People’s 
  Republic of Angola: 1976

1
I will no longer lightly walk behind
a one of you who fear me:
                                     Be afraid.
I plan to give you reasons for your jumpy fits
and facial tics
I will not walk politely on the pavements anymore
and this is dedicated in particular
to those who hear my footsteps
or the insubstantial rattling of my grocery
cart
then turn around
see me
and hurry on
away from this impressive terror I must be:
I plan to blossom bloody on an afternoon
surrounded by my comrades singing
terrible revenge in merciless
accelerating
rhythms
But
I have watched a blind man studying his face.
I have set the table in the evening and sat down
to eat the news.
Regularly
I have gone to sleep.
There is no one to forgive me.
The dead do not give a damn.
I live like a lover
who drops her dime into the phone
just as the subway shakes into the station
wasting her message
canceling the question of her call:
fulminating or forgetful but late
and always after the fact that could save or 
condemn me
I must become the action of my fate.

2
How many of my brothers and my sisters
will they kill
before I teach myself
retaliation?
Shall we pick a number? 
South Africa for instance:
do we agree that more than ten thousand
in less than a year but that less than
five thousand slaughtered in more than six
months will
WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH ME?
I must become a menace to my enemies.

3
And if I 
if I ever let you slide
who should be extirpated from my universe
who should be cauterized from earth
completely
(lawandorder jerkoffs of the first the
                   terrorist degree)
then let my body fail my soul
in its bedeviled lecheries
And if I 
if I ever let love go
because the hatred and the whisperings
become a phantom dictate I o-
bey in lieu of impulse and realities
(the blossoming flamingos of my
                   wild mimosa trees)
then let love freeze me
out.
I must become
I must become a menace to my enemies.

© 2017 by the June M. Jordan Literary Estate.  www.junejordan.com.

There are characters in me who do not talk to each other who fill each other with grief who have never dined at the same table In me there are characters who write their own poetry with my hands who flip through stacks of bills with my hands who make fists of my hands who place my hands on the sofa edge and while one sits down the other stands up, leaves In me there are characters who melt in the snow who drift with the rivers and years later rain into me In me there are characters who sit on a corner and like death talk to no one There are characters in me who arrive too late who are settling and another one sitting facing this sunset sipping tea in me there are characters who stab each other assassinate each other bury each other in the cemetery of my psyche but I with all of my characters go on caring for you ~from Lean Against This Late Hour (Penguin Books, 2020) Translated from the Persian by Ahmad Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey

The gopher on his hind legs	
is taut with holiness and fright.
Miniature and beardless,	
he could be stoned or flooded out,
burnt alive in stubble fields,
martyr to children for a penny a tail.

How can you not believe an animal	
who goes down headfirst
into darkness, into the ceaseless
pull of gravity beneath him?
What faith that takes!

I come to him with questions	
because I love his ears, how perfectly
they fit, how flat they lie against his head.
They hear the inner and the outer	
worlds: what rain says
underground.  The stone’s praise
for the sparrow’s ankle bone.

Little earth-otter, little dusty Lazarus,	
he vanishes, he rises.  He won’t tell us
what he’s seen.

~ from Apocrypha of Light, McLelland & Stewart Ltd, 2002

I like to live in the sound of water,
in the feel of mountain air. A sharp
reminder hits me: this world still is alive;
it stretches out there shivering toward its own
creation, and I'm part of it. Even my breathing
enters into the elaborate give-and-take,
this bowing to sun and moon, day or night,
winter, summer, storm, still—this tranquil
chaos that seems to be going somewhere.
This wilderness with a great peacefulness in it.
This motionless turmoil, this everything dance.

~ from Even in Quiet Places (Confluence Press, 2010)

Older people are exiting this life as if it were a movie… "I didn’t get it,"
they are saying.
He says, "It didn’t seem to have any plot."
"No." she says, "it seemed like things just kept coming at me. Most of the
time I was confused… and there was way too much sex and violence."
"Violence anyway," he says.
"It was not much for character development either; most of the time
people were either shouting or mumbling. Then just when someone started
to make sense and I got interested, they died. Then a whole lot of new
characters came along and I couldn’t tell who was who."
"The whole thing lacked subtlety."
"Some of the scenery was nice."
"Yes."
They walk on in silence for a while. It is a summer night and they walk
slowly, stopping now and then, as if they had no particular place to go.
They walk past a streetlamp where some insects are hurling themselves at
the light, and then on down the block, fading into the darkness.
She says, "I was never happy with the way I looked."
"The lighting was bad and I was no good at dialogue," he says.
"I would have liked to have been a little taller," she says.

~from North of the Cities (Will o’ the Wisp Books, 2007)

've decided to waste my life again,
Like I used to: get drunk on
The light in the leaves, find a wall
Against which something can happen,

Whatever may have happened
Long ago—let a bullet hole echoing
The will of an executioner, a crevice
In which a love note was hidden,

Be a cell where a struggling tendril
Utters a few spare syllables at dawn.
I've decided to waste my life
In a new way, to forget whoever

Touched a hair on my head, because
It doesn't matter what came to pass,
Only that it passed, because we repeat
Ourselves, we repeat ourselves.

I've decided to walk a long way
Out of the way, to allow something
Dreaded to waken for no good reason,
Let it go without saying,

Let it go as it will to the place 
It will go without saying: a wall
Against which a body was pressed
For no good reason, other than this.

~ from May Day (Penguin Books, 2008)

Again the woods are odorous, the lark 
Lifts on upsoaring wings the heaven gray 
That hung above the tree-tops, veiled and dark,  
Where branches bare disclosed the empty day.
  
After long rainy afternoons an hour  
Comes with its shafts of golden light and flings  
Them at the windows in a radiant shower,  
And rain drops beat the panes like timorous wings.  

Then all is still. The stones are crooned to sleep 
By the soft sound of rain that slowly dies;  
And cradled in the branches, hidden deep 
In each bright bud, a slumbering silence lies. 

~ in the public domain

Today, when I could do nothing,
I saved an ant.

It must have come in with the morning paper,
still being delivered
to those who shelter in place.

A morning paper is still an essential service.

I am not an essential service.

I have coffee and books,
time,
a garden,
silence enough to fill cisterns.

It must have first walked
the morning paper, as if loosened ink
taking the shape of an ant.

Then across the laptop computer — warm —
then onto the back of a cushion.

Small black ant, alone,
crossing a navy cushion,
moving steadily because that is what it could do.

Set outside in the sun,
it could not have found again its nest.
What then did I save?

It did not move as if it was frightened,
even while walking my hand,
which moved it through swiftness and air.

Ant, alone, without companions,
whose ant-heart I could not fathom—
how is your life, I wanted to ask.

I lifted it, took it outside.

This first day when I could do nothing,
contribute nothing
beyond staying distant from my own kind,
I did this.

~ This poem first appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle March 24, 2020

Is the soul solid, like iron?
Or is it tender and breakable, like
the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl?
Who has it, and who doesn’t?
I keep looking around me.
The face of the moose is as sad
as the face of Jesus.
The swan opens her white wings slowly.
In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness.
One question leads to another.
Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg?
Like the eye of a hummingbird?
Does it have one lung, like the snake and the scallop?
Why should I have it, and not the anteater
who loves her children?
Why should I have it, and not the camel?
Come to think of it, what about the maple trees?
What about the blue iris?
What about all the little stones, sitting alone in the moonlight?
What about roses, and lemons, and their shining leaves?
What about the grass? 

~ from New and Selected Poems (Beacon Press, 1993)

I want to get up early one more morning,

before sunrise. Before the birds, even.

I want to throw cold water on my face

and be at my work table

when the sky lightens and smoke

begins to rise from the chimneys

of the other houses.

I want to see the waves break

on this rocky beach, not just hear them

break as I did all night in my sleep.

I want to see again the ships

that pass through the Strait from every

seafaring country in the world—

old, dirty freighters just barely moving along,

and the swift new cargo vessels

painted every color under the sun

that cut the water as they pass.

I want to keep an eye out for them.

And for the little boat that plies

the water between the ships

and the pilot station near the lighthouse.

I want to see them take a man off the ship

and put another up on board.

I want to spend the day watching this happen

and reach my own conclusions.

I hate to seem greedy—have so much

to be thankful for already.

But I want to get up early one more morning, at least.

And go to my place with some coffee and wait.

Just wait, to see what’s going to happen.

~ from Where Water Comes Together With Other Water

(Random House, 1985)

I was forever getting lost,	
until one day the Buddha told me:

To walk this Path,	
you will need seven friends—	
mindfulness, curiosity,
courage, joy,
calm, stillness,
and perspective.

For many years, these friends and I have	
traveled together.

Sometimes wandering in circles.
Sometimes taking the long way around.

There were days when I thought I couldn’t go on.
There were days when I thought I was finally beaten.

It’s scary to give all of yourself to just one thing.
What if you don’t make it?

Oh, my heart.
You don’t have to go it alone.

Train yourself		
to train
just
a little 
more gently.
	
~ from the first free women, Poems of the Early Buddhist Nuns, Matty Weingast (Shambhala Publications, 2020)

I was feeling pretty religious
standing on the bridge in my winter coat
looking down at the gray water: 
the sharp little waves dusted with snow, 
fish in their tin armor. 

That's what I like about disappointment: 
the way it slows you down, 
when the querulous insistent chatter of desire
goes dead calm

and the minor roadside flowers
pronounce their quiet colors, 
and the red dirt of the hillside glows. 

She played the flute, he played the fiddle
and the moon came up over the barn. 
Then he didn't get the job, —
or her father died before she told him
that one, most important thing—

and everything got still. 

It was February or October
It was July
I remember it so clear
You don't have to pursue anything ever again
It's over
You're free
You're unemployed

You just have to stand there
looking out on the water
in your trench coat of solitude
with your scarf of resignation
lifting in the wind.

~ from What Narcissism Means to Me (Graywolf Press, 2006)