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*June
Jordan |
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"The
Talking Back of Miss Valentine Jones"
well
I wanted to braid my
hair
bathe and bedeck myself so fine
so fully aforethought for
your pleasure
see:
I wanted to travel and read
and runaround fantastic
into war and peace:
I wanted to
surf
dive
fly
climb
conquer
and be conquered
THEN
I wanted to pickup the phone
and find you asking me
if I might possibly be alone
some night
(so I could answer cool
as the jewels I would wear
on bareskin for you
digmedaddy delectation)
"WHEN
you comin ova?"
But I had to remember to write down
margarine on the list
and shoepolish and a can of
sliced pineapple in case
a company
and a quarta
skim milk cause Teresa's
gaining weight and don' nobody groove on
that much
girl
and next I hadta
sort for darks and lights
before the laundry hit the water which
I had
to kinda keep an eye on
be-cause if the big hose jumps the sink
again that
Mrs. Thompson gointa come upstairs
and brain me with a mop don' smell too
nice even though she hang
it headfirst out the winda
and I had to check
on William like to
burn hisself to death with fever
boy so thin be
callin all day
"Momma! Sing to me?"
"Ma! Am I gone die?"
and me not
wake enough to sit beside him longer
than
to wipe away the sweat or
change the sheets/his shirt and
feed him orange juice
before I fall out of sleep and
sweet My Jesus ain but one can left
and we not thru the afternoon
and now
you (temporarily) shownup with a thing
you says' a poem
and you call it
"Will The Real Miss Black America
Standup?"
guilty po'
mouth
about duty beauties of my
headrag
boozeup doozies about
never mind
cause love is blind
well
I can't use it
and
the very next bodacious Blackman
call me queen
because my life ain shit
because (in any case)
he ain been here to share it
with me
(dish for dish and do for do and
dream for dream)
I'm gone scream him out my house
be-cause what I wanted was
to braid my hair
bathe and bedeck myself so fully
be-cause what I wanted was
your love
not pity
be-cause what I wanted was
your love
your love
© Copyright
2004, June Jordan
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BLACK
ON BLACK RHYME HISTORY SERIES |
NAME
: June
Jordan
b: 1934
d: 2003 |
-
an
African-American political activist,
writer, poet, and teacher, born in Harlem,
New York, to Jamaican immigrants. |
June
Jordan was born in
Harlem in 1938, the
only child of working
class Jamaican parents.
Growing up in an urban ghetto environment, she was influenced by her family's
sense of heritage.
The deepest influences on Jordan's development as an intellectual and as a writer
were her parents.
Exposed from an early age to the classics of the Bible, Shakespeare, Edgar Allen
Poe, and Paul Laurence Dunbar, she began writing poetry at age seven.
Her mother's dreams of becoming an artist, and her suicide before realizing those
dreams, motivated Jordan's feminist writing and action. Her mother was Jordan's
most significant example in the history of neglected lives and dreams of African
American women, which she has dedicated herself to transforming.
One of the most political and personal battles of her life was that of her interracial
marriage while an undergraduate at Barnard College in 1955.
Her marriage and the birth of their son coincided with her involvement in the
first stirrings of the Civil Rights Movement. When she met Malcolm X in
1964, she intensified her activism, joining the Freedom Riders to Baltimore.
The seriousness of her involvement in the Movement was partial reason for the
dissolution of her marriage. In 1966, the year after her mother's suicide, she
and her husband were divorced.
The struggle to support her son and to write energized her efforts to incite
change in the sexist, racist world around her.
Publishing three collections of poetry in the 1970s, Jordan demonstrates a recognition
of Black Aesthetic; she uses language that is accessible, with lyrics that are
forceful yet gentle, expressing the variation within resistance.
Her first collection of essays, Civil Wars (1981)
focuses on the challenges of being a black woman, writer, and single mother,
and clarifies the connection between language and resistance.
On Call (1985)
focuses on liberation struggles around
the world, on complex views of race and
class, and on the championing of Black
English.
Jordan's work in the 1990s continued to be a balance of poetry and essay. She
published two collections of essays, Technical
Difficulties (1992) and Affirmative
Acts (1996), that address issues of race, global politics, capitalism,
and sexuality.
These later works celebrate the power of language to not only speak injustice
but to create truth and freedom. Jordan battled with breast cancer for years
and unfortunately succumbed to the disease in 2003.
Black on Black Rhyme will remember her forever!!
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