Black History Month and Valentines Day

Sunday is Valentine's Day and the sermon will be about love and the Song of Solomon. The Rev asked us to submit love poems. Well since it is Black History month of course, I thought about my favorite African American woman poet, June Jordan. June and I were children together. We went to day camp and then sleep away camp at Robin Hood Camp run by the Brooklyn YWCA. I later found out by reading an interview in Essence magazine that June hated the camp, but I loved it. I credit my leadership skills to the fact that I went to camp and became a camp councilor. June must have learned something at summer camp because I read in her biography that she and her husband spent their honeymoon back packing! I taught hiking and back packing at the camp as a councilor.

So here is the love poem that she wrote:

Poem for My Love

By June Jordan

How do we come to be here next to each other

in the night

Where are the stars that show us to our love

inevitable

Outside the leaves flame usual in darkness

and the rain

falls cool and blessed on the holy flesh

the black men waiting on the corner for

a womanly mirage

I am amazed by peace

It is this possibility of you

asleep

and breathing in the quiet air

Reprinted from Directed by Desire: the Collected Poems of June Jordan (2005), edited by Jan Heller Levi and Sara Miles.

June was born in 1936 and died of cancer in 2002, so we are contemporaries.

Here is her impression of her education as poet in the time when there were no Black Studies programs.

"For most of her high school years, Jordan's parents sent her to a prep school where she was the only black student. Her teachers encouraged her interest in poetry, but did not introduce her to the work of any black poets. After high school, Jordan enrolled in Barnard College in New York City. Though she enjoyed some of her classes and admired many of the people she met, she described her years there in Civil Wars this way: "No one ever presented me with a single Black author, poet, historian, personage, or idea, for that matter. Nor was I ever assigned a single woman to study as a thinker, or writer, or poet, or life force. Nothing that I learned, here, lessened my feeling of pain and confusion and bitterness as related to my origins: my street, my family, my friends. Nothing showed me how I might try to alter the political and economic realities underlying our Black condition in white America." Because of this feeling of dissatisfaction, Jordan left Barnard without graduating. " (From her biography)

At the end of her life, she was poet in residence at UC Berkley. I sent a letter to her, which she was too sick with cancer to read. I got a note from her son expressing his thanks that I had thought about his mother;

Jeannette