Well, it happened, with my talented and wonderful friend Christina on board, I fell off updating this blog myself. I’ve missed many Poetry Ptuesdays and I’m backlogged on Spending Breakdown by TWO months! I haven’t completely finished my bench, and my plants are doing all kinds of crazy summer stunts that I’ve not (obnoxiously) updated on. Yesterday I trimmed my sage box and made a lot of dehydrated sage!

 

To make up for my tepid, uninspired “return”, here is a really powerful and gorgeous poem by Jamaican-American poet and activist June Jordan.

*

Poem for South African Women

Our own shadows disappear as the feet of thousands

by the tens of thousands pound the fallow land

into new dust that

rising like a marvelous pollen will be

fertile

even as the first woman whispering

imagination to the trees around her made

for righteous fruit

from such deliberate defense of life

as no other still

will claim inferior to any other safety

in the world

 

The whispers too they

intimate to the inmost ear of every spirit

now aroused they

carousing in ferocious affirmation

of all peaceable and loving amplitude

sound a certainly unbounded heat

from a baptismal smoke where yes

there will be fire

 

And the babies cease alarm as mothers

raising arms

and heart high as the stars so far unseen

nevertheless hurl into the universe

a moving force

irreversible as light years

traveling to the open

eye

 

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

*

While not quite as brimming with sagacity and strength as the Jordan’s poem, I am working to bring y’all the small and ugly fruits of my tremendous labors. Look out for me catching up on spending breakdowns, finishing my bench repair, and obnoxiously showing off my plants some more in the near future.

 

Happy Tuesday, kitty kats.

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