June Jordan Quotes

... momma
help me
turn the face of history
to your face.
- Getting Down To Get Over - Dedicated To My Mother

They blew up your homes and demolished the grocery / stores and blocked the Red Cross and took away doctors / to jail and they cluster-bombed girls and boys / whose bodies / swelled purple and black into twice the original size / and tore the buttocks from a four month old baby / and then / they said this was brilliant

...love without being destroyed...

"It would be something fine if we could learn how to bless the lives of children. They are the people of new life. Children are the only people nobody can blame. They are the only ones always willing to make a start; they have no choice. Children are the ways the world begin again and again.

"But in general, our children have no voice — that we will listen to. We force, we blank them into the bugle/bell regulated lineup of the Army/school, and we insist on silence.

"But even if we cannot learn to bless their lives (our future times), at least we can try to find out how we already curse and burden their experience: how we limit the wheeling of their inner eyes, how we terrify their trust, and how we condemn the raucous laughter of their natural love. What's more, if we will hear them, they will teach us what they need; they will bluntly formulate the tenderness of their deserving."

I am working for the courage to admit the truth that Bertolt Brecht has written; he says, "It takes courage to say that the good were defeated not because they were good, but because they were weak." I cherish the mercy and the grace of women’s work. But I know there is new work that we must undertake as well: that new work will make defeat detestable to us. That new women’s work will mean we will not die trying to stand up: we will live that way: standing up. I came too late to help my mother to her feet. By way of everlasting thanks to all of the women who have helped me to stay alive I am working never to be late again.

It occurs to me that much organizational grief could be avoided if people understood that partnership in misery does not necessarily provide for partnership for change: When we get the monsters off our backs all of us may want to run in very different directions.

Rather than struggling to share in a patently evil kind of power, the power of people who will demean and destroy those who are weaker than they, I think we might, more usefully, have sought to redefine that meaning of power, altogether.

"The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think." June Jordan

A man is not a tree'...If we remain where we start from we will neither grow nor flourish.

And I am not pleased
I am not very pleased
None of this fits into my notion of “things going very well

Not too many people wanted to grant that maybe schools are political institutions teaching power to the powerful and something unpalatable and destructive to the weak. Not too many people wanted to reexamine their fantasies about the democratizing function of American education.

If we collaborate with the powerful then our language will lose its currency as a means to tell the truth in order to change the truth.

Freedom is indivisible or it is nothing at all besides sloganeering and temporary, short-sighted, and short-lived advancement for a few.

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

Oh! If you would only walk
into this room
again and touch me anywhere
I swear
I would not long for heaven or
for earth
more than I'd wish to stay there
touched
and touching you