June Jordan

I am the history of battery assault and limitless
armies against whatever I want to do with my mind and my body and my soul

I am a stranger, learning to love the strangers around me

This is the meaning of poverty: when you have nothing better to do than to hate somebody who, just exactly like yourself, has nothing better to do than to pick on you instead of trying to figure out how come there's nothing better to do.

In the context of tragedy, all polite behavior is self-denial.

To begin is no more agony than opening your hand.

Do You Follow Me We are the wrong people of
the wrong skin on the wrong continent and what
in the hell is everybody being reasonable about

We are the ones we've been waiting for.

In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways. Indeed, originality is recognized as disobedience, pathology, incorrigible character and/or unlawful conduct to be prosecuted by the state.

To believe is to become what you believe

Something has to be done about the way in which this world is set up.

I am a woman. And I am seeking an attitude. I am trying to find reasons for pride.

I could no longer participate in an exchange requiring acrobatics of self-denial.

I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black; it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.

the motivation behind every sentence is the wish to say something real to somebody real.

How many of these gentle people have I helped to kill just by paying my taxes? How could these people living in this poor country where so many dreams arise from the facts of so much horror, how could they ever hurt me or any of us, up here, in the chill indifference of North America? They have given to me and to all of us an amazing example of self-love. With their bodies and their blood they have shown us the bravery that self-love requires.