I am no longer waiting for a special occasion; 
I burn the best candles on ordinary days.
I am no longer waiting for the house to be clean; 
I fill it with people who understand that even dust is Sacred.
I am no longer waiting for everyone to understand me; 
It’s just not their task.
I am no longer waiting for the perfect children; 
my children have their own names that burn as brightly as any star.
I am no longer waiting for the other shoe to drop; 
It already did, and I survived.
I am no longer waiting for the time to be right; 
the time is always now!!
I am no longer waiting for the mate who will complete me; 
I am grateful to be so warmly, tenderly held.
I am no longer waiting for a quiet moment; 
my heart can be stilled whenever it is called.
I am no longer waiting for the world to be at peace; 
I unclench my grasp and breathe peace in and out.
I am no longer waiting to do something great; 
being awake to carry my grain of sand is enough.
I am no longer waiting to be recognized; 
I know that I dance in a holy circle.
I am no longer waiting for Forgiveness.
I believe, I believe.

~ from National Catholic Reporter December 15, 2006

All day he works at his cousin’s mill, 
so when he gets home at night, he always sits at this one window, 
sees one time of day, twilight.
There should be more time like this, to sit and dream.
It’s as his cousin says:
Living— living takes you away from sitting.

In the window, not the world but a squared-off landscape 
representing the world.  The seasons change, 
each visible only a few hours a day.
Green things followed by golden things followed by whiteness—
abstractions from which come intense pleasures, 
like the figs on the table.

At dusk, the sun goes down in a haze of red fire between two poplars.
It goes down late in summer—sometimes it’s hard to stay awake.

Then everything falls away.
The world for a little longer 
is something to see, then only something to hear,
crickets, cicadas.
Or to smell sometimes, aroma of lemon trees, of orange trees.
Then sleep takes this away also.

But it’s easy to give things up like this, experimentally, 
for a matter of hours.

I open my fingers—
I let everything go.

Visual world, language, 
rustling of leaves in the night,
smell of high grass, of woodsmoke.

I let it go, then I light the candle. 
 
~ from A Village Life (Ferrar, Straus and  Giroux, 2009)

for Michael

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn’t need you to hold it down.
It doesn’t need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records . . .

Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.

~ from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems 
(Far Corner Books, 1995)

You tell me to live each day as if it were my last. This is in the kitchen where before coffee I complain of the day ahead—that obstacle race of minutes and hours, grocery stores and doctors. But why the last? I ask. Why not live each day as if it were the first— all raw astonishment, Eve rubbing her eyes awake that first morning, the sun coming up like an ingénue in the east? You grind the coffee with the small roar of a mind trying to clear itself. I set the table, glance out the window where dew has baptized every living surface. ~from Insomnia (W. W. Norton, 2015)

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)In out-of-the-way places of the heart, Where your thoughts never think to wander, This beginning has been quietly forming, Waiting until you were ready to emerge. For a long time it has watched your desire, Feeling the emptiness growing inside you, Noticing how you willed yourself on, Still unable to leave what you had outgrown. It watched you play with the seduction of safety And the gray promises that sameness whispered, Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent, Wondered would you always live like this. Then the delight, when your courage kindled, And out you stepped onto new ground, Your eyes young again with energy and dream, A path of plenitude opening before you. Though your destination is not yet clear You can trust the promise of this opening; Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning That is at one with your life’s desire. Awaken your spirit to adventure; Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk; Soon you will be home in a new rhythm, For your soul senses the world that awaits you. ~ from To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings (Doubleday, 2008)

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.