Sunflower Sonnet Number Two - June Jordan

Poem for My Love - June Jordan

I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies - June Jordan

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.

Poem a Day: Intifada Incantation: Poem 38 for b.b.L. by June Jordan

Intifada Incantation: Poem 38 for b.b.L. by June Jordan

 I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED GENOCIDE TO STOP I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AND REACTION I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED MUSIC OUT THE WINDOWS I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED NOBODY THIRST AND NOBODY NOBODY COLD I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED I WANTED JUSTICE UNDER MY NOSE I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED BOUNDARIES TO DISAPPEAR I WANTED NOBODY ROLL BACK THE TREES! I WANTED NOBODY TAKE AWAY DAYBREAK! I WANTED NOBODY FREEZE ALL THE PEOPLE ON THEIR KNEES! I WANTED YOU I WANTED YOUR KISS ON THE SKIN OF MY SOUL AND NOW YOU SAY YOU LOVE ME AND I STAND DESPITE THE TRILLION TREACHERIES OF SAND YOU SAY YOU LOVE ME AND I HOLD THE LONGING OF THE WINTER IN MY HAND YOU SAY YOU LOVE ME AND I COMMIT TO FRICTION AND THE UNDERTAKING OF THE PEARL YOU SAY YOU LOVE ME YOU SAY YOU LOVE ME AND I HAVE BEGUN I BEGIN TO BELIEVE MAYBE MAYBE YOU DO I AM TASTING MYSELF IN THE MOUTH OF THE SUN

Calling on All Silent Minorities - June Jordan

The warble of melting snow is the river

is the bleat of the sandhill crane is the hush of the autonomous mind        of the flame above the canyon is the cow drinking water from mud          is the cow and the word cow is the deckled face in the overhang of stone is the bone weathered into wood is the wood weathered to stone is the sentence is the moment that longs to be the sentence hidden in a sentence is the legislated road         is the grass is the grass is the nerve that runs from socket to wrist is the common knowledge of aperture and speed is the hole to be yawned into         its origin         the stone that says the impulse of water         is the moss against is the growing in spite of

by Emily Lee Luan

Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 18, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets

Hear the poet read this poem aloud here

little prayer - Danez Smith

No Pain Like Our Pain - Rabbi Tamara Cohen

“Look carefully and see if there could possibly be pain like my pain, like the one bestowed by You upon me.” – Lamentations 1:12 

Dear God, help us look, look closer so that we may see our children in their children, their children in our own. 

Help us look so that we may see You – in the bleary eyes of each orphan, each grieving childless mother, each masked and camouflaged fighter for his people’s dignity. 

Dear God, Divine Exiled and Crying One, Loosen our claim to our own uniqueness. Soften this hold on our exclusive right – to pain, to compassion, to justice. 

May your children, all of us unique and in Your image, come to know the quiet truths of shared pain, shared hope, shared land, shared humanity, shared risk, shared courage, shared peace. 

In Sh’Allah. Ken Yehi Ratzon. May it be Your will. And may it be ours. 

Virginia Woolf〡Selected Prose; Mrs Dalloway

The Diameter of The Bomb - Yehuda Amichai

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters, with four dead and eleven wounded. And around these, in a larger circle of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered and one graveyard. But the young woman who was buried in the city she came from, at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers, enlarges the circle considerably, and the solitary man mourning her death at the distant shores of a country far across the sea includes the entire world in the circle. And I won’t even mention the crying of orphans that reaches up to the throne of God and beyond, making a circle with no end and no God. 

Mary Magdalene about 1415–1420 Boucicaut Master (French, active about 1390 - 1430) Not currently on view the getty

The Man Says Kent State Means Something Different to his Generation - Carrie George

If not for the field that housed early spring snowball fights, that cradled lonely skin with its wet grass-lick; if not for the breeze that rocked hammock after hammock drowsy between the trees; if not for the dirt that dipped to the weight of the bell; if not for the bell; if not for the asphalt above lined with white paint and baked from wink of May; if not for the short-cut to class, the feet pressing slow, then quick, then snare-drum flicking, then wondering the sound of blood when it fills the ears, how young iron cools the finger, how to load and unload a stomach—the stomach so hollow, someone said, as the boy dropped to the ground in the middle of a parking space.

If not for the field as quiet as vein, as lonesome as a petal beneath the earlobe; if not for the lot dusted in shadow, the smooth stones and posts of light climbing high like corn stalks or upturned lungs; if not for the field that still cries between pieces of wind, then maybe this would not embody ourselves.

We walk through winter with ghosts on our backs. We walk with bare feet, and our skin sheds like an unlived memory. We listen when the goldfinch beats its wings. We listen when the river coughs up bone.

We were not there, but we are here, digging palms into snow, leaves, daffodils, digging so the grave is never covered, so the stench of felled bodies is as permanent as paralysis, everlasting as death.

We dig to remember the lives once as young as ours. New lives that still grow in this field as grass does, remembering with every passing year. Each and every passing year.

The Creation Story - Joy Harjo

I’m not afraid of love or its consequence of light.

It’s not easy to say this or anything when my entrails dangle between paradise and fear.

I am ashamed I never had the words to carry a friend from her death to the stars correctly.

Or the words to keep my people safe from drought or gunshot.

The stars who were created by words are circling over this house formed of calcium, of blood

this house in danger of being torn apart by stones of fear.

If these words can do anything if these songs can do anything I say bless this house with stars.

Transfix us with love.

revolutionary letter #4 by Diane Di Prima

Revolutionary Letter #12

the vortex of creation is the vortex of destruction the vortex of artistic creation is the vortex of self destruction the vortex of political creation is the vortex of flesh destruction flesh is in the fire, it curls and terribly warps fat is in the fire, it drips and sizzling sings bones are in the fire they crack tellingly in subtle hieroglyphs of oracle charcoal signed the smell of your burning hair for every revolutionary must at last will his own destruction rooted as he is in the past he sets out to destroy

Revolutionary Letter #2 - Diane di Prima

the value of an individual life the credo they taught us to instill fear, and inaction, ‘you only live once’ a fog in our eyes, we are endless as the sea, not separate, we die a million times a day, we are born a million times, each breath life and death get up, put on your shoes, get started, someone else will finish // Tribe an organism, one flesh, breathing joy as the stars breathe destiny down on us, get going, join hands, see to business, thousands of sons will see to it when you fall, you will grow a thousands times in the bellies of your sisters

Revolutionary Letter #36 - Diane di Prima

who is the we, who is the they in this thing, did we or they kill the indians, not me my people brought here, cheap labor to exploit a continent for them, did we or they exploit it? do you admit complicity, say ‘we have to get out of Vietnam, we really should stop poisoning the water, etc.’ look closer, look again, secede, declare your independence, don’t accept a share of the guilt they want to lay on us MAN IS INNOCENT & BEAUTIFUL & born to perfect bliss they envy, heavy deeds make heavy hearts and to them, life is suffering, stand clear.