Time for more poems I think, poems of courage and beauty, poems about the fight for a better world. More from June Jordan.

47,000 Windows

— excerpts from Some Changes (1971)

a note beneath the title tells us this was written for a law passed to allow some light and air into the Lower East Side Slums…landlords complied by blasting false windows into brick.

4. Unskilled millions crammed old mansions
broke apart large rooms and took a corner
held a place a spot a bed a chair a box
a looking glass
and kept that space (except for death)
a safety now for fugitives
from infamy and famine
working hard to live.

5. In place of land that street the outhouse
tenement testimonies
to a horrifying speculation that would quarter
and condemn
debase and shadow and efface
the pivacies of human being.

6. Real estate rose as profit spread
to mutilate the multitudes and kill them
living just to live
What can a man survive?
They say: The poor persist. (61)

10. The Tenement Act of 1869
was merciful, well-meant, and fine
in its enforcement
tore 47,000 windows out of hellhole
shelter of no light.

It must be hard to make a window. (62)

Poem about the Sweetwaters of the City

— from Poems of Return

the subway comes up
for air
a quick one
two stops rattle rusted short
above ground
where the letters tell me
PLEASE KEEP HANDS OFF DOORS
(Or near there)
you assume the buildings and
the smallprint roadways and
the cornered accidents
of roof and oozing tar and ordinary concrete
zigzag. Well.
It is not beautiful.
It never was.
These are the shaven
private parts
the city show
of what somebody means
when he don’t even bother
just to say
“I don’t give a goddamn”
(and)
“I hate you” (133)

This next one about the ways our lives are constrained by our intersecting identities…I have felt this, I have felt all of this.

Excerpt from Poem About My Rights

(From Passion – 1980)

Even tonight and I need to take a walk and clear
my head about this poem about why I can’t
go out without changing my clothes my shoes
my body posture my gender identity my age
my status as a woman alone in the evening/
alone on the streets/alone not being the point/
the point being that I can’t do what I want
to do with my own body because I am the wrong
sex the wrong age the wrong skin and
suppose it was not here in the city but down on the beach/
or far into the woods and I wanted to go
there by myself thinking about God/or thinking
about children or thinking about the world/all of it
disclosed by the stars and the silence:
I could not go and I could not think and I could not
stay there
alone
as I need to be
alone because I can’t do what I want to do with my own
body and
who in the hell set things up
like this (309)

Maybe this next one doesn’t quite fit here, not being a city, but displacement…oh, displacement feels the same, just as struggle does.

from Lebanon Lebanon

(Kissing God Goodbye – 1997)

behold the refugees
aroused by soap
and blankets
(maybe
blankets)

behold a people
lost inside a landscape
that belongs to them
behold a landscape
taken by the fiend
of force (515)

And this one? This last one for hope and all the things we do because we must, the struggle that makes us who we are…

Excerpt from War and Memory

(Naming our Destiny – 1989)

I fell in love
I fell in love with Black Men White
men Black
women White women
and I
dared myself to say The Palestinians
and I
worried about unilateral words like Lesbian or Nationalist
and I
tried to speak Spanish when I traveled to Managua
and I
dreamed about The Fourteenth Amendment
and I
defied the hatred of the hateful everywhere
as best I could
I mean
I took long nightly walks to emulate the Chinese Revolutionaries
and I
always wore one sweater less than absolutely necessary to keep warm

and I wrote everything I knew how to write against apartheid
and I
thought I was a warrior growing up
and I
buried my father with all of the ceremony all of the music I could piece together
and I
lust for justice
and I
make that quest arthritic/pigeon-toed/however
and I
invent the mother of the courage I require not to quit (470)

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