Haruko/Love Poems

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

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

Publishers Weekly

This latest offering by Jordan ( Naming Our Destiny ) begins with a series of poems written in 1991 and 1992 to Haruko, her female lover. What strikes one here is the absolute fragility of love, the premonitions of future loss that invade the speaker's present. ``Then how should I / subsist / without the benediction of our bodies / intertwined / or why?'' she asks. Never answered, the question will be posed again and again with slight variations as if, in the act of writing, one finds continuance. Moving on to love poems culled from four previous volumes, the reader senses Jordan's full range. Not only is heterosexual love given its due, but one poem seems to capture the transitional moment when the speaker wavers between her love for men and the newfound possibility of loving women. Jordan's writing is sensual and hard-edged at the same time, insisting that passion exists among commonplace objects. By beginning a poem with ``but,'' Jordan makes one feel as if one has entered a room mid-conversation and is immediately included and welcome. Her throbbing, relentless rhythm is so effective that readers find themselves mouthing the words. It's impossible to sit silently back. (Feb.)