June Jordan
June Jordan
June Millicent Jordanwas a Caribbean-American bisexual poet and activist...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth9 July 1936
CountryUnited States of America
successful justice enemy
Good poetry and successful revolution change our lives. And you cannot compose a good poem or wage a revolution without changing consciousness unless you attack the language that you share with your enemies and invent a language that you share with your allies.
names
I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name
way serious telling-the-truth
In the process of telling the truth about what you feel or what you see, each of us has to get in touch with himself or herself in a really deep, serious way.
fear white america
We do not deride the fears of prospering white America. A nation of violence and private property has every reason to dread the violated and the deprived.
america who-i-am soul
Body and soul, Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity: How can I be who I am?
hurt children differences
To rescue our children we will have to let them save us from the power we embody: we will have to trust the very difference that they forever personify. And we will have to allow them the choice, without fear of death: that they may come and do likewise or that they may come and that we will follow them, that a little child will lead us back to the child we will always be, vulnerable and wanting and hurting for love and for beauty.
sweet sea waiting
And who will join this standing up and the ones who stood without sweet company will sing and sing back into the mountains and if necessary even under the sea: we are the ones we have been waiting for.
freedom power african-american
Like a lot of Black women, I have always had to invent the power my freedom requires ...
beautiful love-yourself profound
To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that's political, in its most profound way.
love hate names
As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words. I love the infinite evidence and change and requirements and possibilities of language; every human use of words that is joyful, or honest or new, because experience is new... But as a Black poet and writer, I hate words that cancel my name and my history and the freedom of my future: I hate the words that condemn and refuse the language of my people in America.
purpose durability increase
Maybe the purpose of being here, wherever we are, is to increase the durability and occasions of love among and between peoples.
beautiful love-yourself i-love-myself
To tell the truth is to become beautiful.
change life-changing yes-we-can
We are the ones we've been waiting for.
success determination motivation
Self-determination has to mean that the leader is your individual gut, and heart, and mind or we're talking about power, again, and its rather well-known impurities. Who is really going to care whether you live or die and who is going to know the most intimate motivation for your laughter and your tears is the only person to be trusted to speak for you and to decide what you will or will not do.