June Jordan: As a child I was taught that to tell the truth was often...

To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that's political, in its most profound way.

June Jordan

love-yourself beautiful profound

Maybe the purpose of being here, wherever we are, is to increase the durability and occasions of love among and between peoples.

June Jordan

durability increase purpose

Like a lot of Black women, I have always had to invent the power my freedom requires.

June Jordan

african-american freedom power

Our earth is round, and, among other things, that means that you and I can hold completely different points of view and both be right. The difference of our positions will show stars in your window I cannot even imagine. Your sky may burn with light, while mine, at the same moment, spreads beautiful to darkness. Still we must choose how we separately corner the circling universe of our experience. Once chosen, our cornering will determine the message of any star and darkness we encounter.

June Jordan

stars beautiful mean

Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.

June Jordan

brilliant political telling-the-truth

If you are free, you are not predictable and you are not controllable.

June Jordan

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What's important about poetry in the context of leadership is that most of the time, power has to do with dominance. But poetry is never about dominance. Poetry is powerful but it cannot even aspire to dominate anyone. It means making a connection. That's what it means.

June Jordan

powerful poetry mean

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.

June Jordan

laughter determination success

We are the ones we've been waiting for.

June Jordan

yes-we-can life-changing change

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.

June Jordan

hurt love children

To tell the truth is to become beautiful.

June Jordan

i-love-myself love-yourself beautiful

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.

June Jordan

waiting sea sweet

Overall, white men run America. From nuclear armaments to the filth and jeopardy of New York City subways to the cruel mismanagement of health care, is there anything to boast about?

June Jordan

new-york running men

The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think

June Jordan

telling-the-truth firsts thinking

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.

June Jordan

hate names love

I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black: it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.

June Jordan

success happiness life

Body and soul, Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity: How can I be who I am?

June Jordan

who-i-am soul america

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.

June Jordan

telling-the-truth serious way

I am a stranger, learning to love the strangers around me

June Jordan

learning-to-love stranger

... if your heart and your honest body can be controlled by the state, or controlled by community taboo, are you not then, and in that case, no more than a slave ruled by outside force? What tyranny could exceed a tyranny that dictates to the human heart, and that attempts to dictate the public career of an honest human body?

June Jordan

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As a child I was taught that to tell the truth was often painful. As an adult I have learned that not to tell the truth is more painful, and that the fear of telling the truth - whatever the truth may be - that fear is the most painful sensation of a moral life.