Life is the only way 	
to get covered in leaves,
catch your breath on the sand,
rise on wings;

to be a dog,
or stroke its warm fur;

to tell pain
from everything it’s not;

to squeeze inside events,
dawdle in views,
to seek the least of all possible mistakes.

An extraordinary chance	
to remember for a moment
a conversation held
with the lamp switched off;

and if only once
to stumble on a stone,
end up drenched in one downpour or another,

mislay your keys in the grass;
and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes;

and to keep on not knowing
something important.

~ from Map, Collected and Last Poems, Translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak  
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2015)

These poems
they are things that I do
in the dark
reaching for you
whoever you are
and
are you ready?
 
These words
they are stones in the water
running away
 
These skeletal lines
they are desperate arms for my longing and love.
 
I am a stranger
learning to worship the strangers
around me
 
whoever you are
whoever I may become.

~ from We’re On: A June Jordan Reader 
(Alice James Books, 2017)

Sometimes it seems as though some puppet-player,
   A clenched claw cupping a craggy chin
Sits just beyond the border of our seeing,
   Twitching the strings with slow, sardonic grin.

~ from Negro Poets and Their Poems (Associated Publishers, 1923

I wake, doubt, beside you,
like a curtain half-open.

I dress doubting,
like a cup
undecided if it has been dropped.

I eat doubting,
work doubting,
go out to a dubious cafe with skeptical friends.

I go to sleep doubting myself,
as a herd of goats
sleep in a suddenly gone-quiet truck.

I dream you, doubt,
nightly—
for what is the meaning of dreaming
if not that all we are while inside it
is transient, amorphous, in question?

Left hand and right hand,
doubt, you are in me,
throwing a basketball, guiding my knife and my fork.
Left knee and right knee,
we run for a bus,
for a meeting that surely will end before we arrive.

I would like
to grow content in you, doubt,
as a double-hung window
settles obedient into its hidden pulleys and ropes.

I doubt I can do so:
your own counterweight governs my nights and my days.

As the knob of hung lead holds steady
the open mouth of a window,
you hold me,
my kneeling before you resistant, stubborn,
offering these furious praises
I can’t help but doubt you will ever be able to hear.

~ from Ledger (Alfred A. Knopf, 2020)

Our Buddha nature not easily grasped.
Only a clear mind will capture it.            
Bright as a jewel fired in volcanic heat;
A lotus plucked from a kiln, its hue, lush and fresh.                        

~ translated from the Vietnamese by Kevin Bowen and 
Nguyen Ba Chung, 2007

My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky: So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a man; So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die! The Child is father of the man; And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety. ~ Public domain

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)