On Time Tanka

June Jordan - 1936-2002

I refuse to choose
between lynch rope and gang rape
the blues is the blues!
my skin and my sex: Deep dues
I have no wish to escape

I refuse to lose
the flame of my single space
this safety I choose
between your fist and my face
between my gender and race

All black and blue news
withers the heart of my hand
and leads to abuse
no one needs to understand:
suicide wipes out the clues

Big-Time-Juicy-Fruit!
Celebrity-Rich-Hero
Rollin out the Rolls!
Proud cheatin on your (Black) wife
Loud beatin on your (white) wife

Real slime open mouth
police officer-true-creep
evil-and-uncouth
fixin to burn black people
killin the song of our sleep

Neither one of you
gets any play in my day
I know what you do
your money your guns your say
so against my pepper spray

Okay! laugh away!
I hear you and I accuse
you both: I refuse
to choose: All black and blue news
means that I hurt and I lose.

Occasions

Themes

Forms

About This Poem

“There are certain poets whose works breathe and dream far beyond the first birth of their language. June Jordan’s ‘On Time Tanka’ fills an old form with rage and Black love at once. To defy any form, box, grave, or body inflicted as a definition speaks to the core of Jordan’s craft and identity. The rhythm of this poem gives to us Jordan’s unmitigated powers as though she is, as she will always be, standing up for the lives and rights we too must dream, must demand. In this poem language and action are immediate and urgent as the times we are confronting. Against that perpetual confrontation, June Jordan lived, writing furiously for herself and for those she knew would be coming through the violence of America. In the name of listening and truth-telling, the poetry of June Jordan resists memory and can never be silenced.”
—Rachel Eliza Griffiths

2019

I could string him back up the tree, if you’d like.
        Return his skin’s meaning to an easy distance, coal dust, blaze
And Willie Brown him. You
        Love how the blood muddies the original,
The way it makes a stage of my speechifying, this leeching
        Capital from his dying,
Like an activist. I know

I’m not supposed to sing

Of his ringing
        Penetrability, some hole I open impose
On the form—but all I see is bullets, bullets discerning him,
        As years ago it was rope.
I could pull it tighter, finger each bullet deeper,
        If you’d like, an inch rougher,
Far enough to where becomes that second heat, erotic.

I could use the erotic,

If you’d like,
        So ungarish, baring not too frank
A mood, subtle so you need it.— Funny
        How some dark will move illicit if you close your eyes,
The way, say, my black
        Pleasure is named too explicit for a page, but this menace
I put in it is not.

I could yank and knot

The rope, if you’d like, him like a strange fragment
        In them trees,
And the word “again” spelled out about his neck
        Would be the rope’s predicate till let wild, patterned and
Fierce his moan.
        It is a tragedy. No. It is a sonnet, how I know
Already how he ends,

But I could make him

Her, if you’d like, regender them till merely
        Canvas for your “empathy,”
Soup for my mouth. Still, if I could but just get
        This blunt,
Burnt lynched body up
        From on
Out the pocket behind my eye

All trees could be themselves again, all sound.

Rickey Laurentiis

2018

Poems

On Time Tanka

More by June Jordan

A Poem about Intelligence for My Brothers and Sisters (audio only)

Shooting the Dog (audio only)

6.3.96-6.4.96

Related Poems

The Chil’ren Might Know

Tanka Diary [Don't need picket fences, brick wall]

2019

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On Time Tanka

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