Poem for South African Women
Commemoration
of the 40,000 women and children who, August 9, 1956, presented
themselves in bodily protest against the “dompass” in the capital of
apartheid. Presented at The United Nations, August 9, 1978.
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
From Directed by Desire: The Complete Poems of June Jordan (Copper
Canyon Press, 2005). Copyright © 2005, 2017 by the June Jordan Literary
Estate. Used with the permission of the June Jordan Literary Estate, www.junejordan.com.
