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.