Soon Come

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.

Written by June Jordan (1936 - 2002)

I have been in a pause.  I just started reading Alice Walker's "We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For" and she speaks of "the pause, the universal place of stopping...the universal moment of reflection."  I have stopped writing and I reflect on my life's journey to this moment often.  I sit in silence in my 3rd floor room and drift off into afternoon naps.  I ponder deep and shallow issues at stop lights.  I pause often.  I feel a shift in my spirit and suddenly the thoughts and feelings I kept bottled inside are once again ready to be recorded and shared.  So perhaps soon I will write again.  Maybe not!  But deep inside I feel that tugging and when the desire is strong enough I will submit.  Life is taking interesting turns, I am rolling with it.  School is going awesomely!  I am pulling down As left and right and am planning on finishing my first semester strong!  I am having a consuming textual relationship with someone, it fills my days with laughter and inappropriateness and I love it.  Mom is still floating back and forth between here and Canada, but Gran is coming from Haiti soon so she'll be back more permanently.  I am happier than sad, calmer and less frustrated.  I am much closer to 30 than I once was and can look back and accept the life I've lived thus far, what a gift.