Elegy for a Soldier

June Jordan, 1936-2002

The city where I knew you was swift.

A lover cabbed to Brooklyn

(broke, but so what) after the night shift

in a Second Avenue

diner. The lover was a Quaker,

a poet, an anti-war

activist. Was blonde, was twenty-four.

Wet snow fell on the access

road to the Manhattan Bridge. I was

neither lover, slept uptown.

But the arteries, streetlights, headlines,

phonelines, feminine plural

links ran silver through the night city

as dawn and the yellow cab

passed on the frost-blurred bridge, headed for

that day’s last or first coffee.

The city where I knew you was rich

in bookshops, potlucks, ad hoc

debates, demos, parades and picnics.

There were walks I liked to take.

I was on good terms with two rivers.

You turned, burned, flame-wheel of words

lighting the page, good neighbor on your

homely street in Park Slope, whose

Russian zaydes, Jamaican grocers,

dyke vegetarians, young

gifted everyone, claimed some changes

—at least a new food co-op.

In the laundromat, ordinary

women talked revolution.

We knew we wouldn’t live forever

but it seemed as if we could.

The city where I knew you was yours

and mine by birthright: Harlem,

the Bronx. Separately we left it

and came separately back.

There’s no afterlife for dialogue,

divergences we never

teased apart to weave back together.

Death slams down in the midst of

all your unfinished conversations.

Whom do I address when I

address you, larger than life as you

always were, not alive now?

Words are not you, poems are not you,

ashes on the Pacific

tide, you least of all. I talk to my-

self to keep the line open.

The city where I knew you is gone.

Pink icing roses spelled out

PASSION on a book-shaped chocolate cake.

The bookshop’s a sushi bar

now, and PASSION is long out of print.

We have a Republican

mayor. Threats keep citizens in line:

anthrax; suicide attacks.

A scar festers where towers once were;

dissent festers unexpressed.

You are dead of a woman’s disease.

Who gets to choose what battle

takes her down? Down to the ocean, friends

mourn you, with no time to mourn.

II.

You, who stood alone in the tall bay window

of a Brooklyn brownstone, conjuring morning

with free-flying words, knew the power, terror

in words, in flying;

knew the high of solitude while the early

light prowled Seventh Avenue, lupine, hungry

like you, your spoils raisins and almonds, ballpoint

pen, yellow foolscap.

You, who stood alone in your courage, never

hesitant to underline the connections

(between rape, exclusion and occupation...)

and separations

were alone and were not alone when morning

blotted the last spark of you out, around you

voices you no longer had voice to answer,

eyes you were blind to.

All your loves were singular: you scorned labels.

Claimed black; woman, and for the rest eluded

limits, quicksilver (Caribbean), staked out

self-definition.

Now your death, as if it were “yours”: your house, your

dog, your friends, your son, your serial lovers.

Death’s not “yours,” what’s yours are a thousand poems

alive on paper,

in the present tense of a thousand students’

active gaze at printed pages and blank ones

which you gave permission to blacken into

outrage and passion.

You, at once an optimist, a Cassandra,

Lilith in the wilderness of her lyric,

were a black American, born in Harlem,

citizen soldier

If you had to die—and I don’t admit it—

who dared “What if, each time they kill a black man /

we kill a cop?” couldn’t you take down with you

a few prime villains

in the capitol, who are also mortal?

June, you should be living, the states are bleeding.

Leaden words like “Homeland” translate abandoned

dissident discourse.

Twenty years ago, you denounced the war crimes

still in progress now, as Jenin, Rammallah

dominate, then disappear from the headlines.

Palestine: your war.

“To each nation, its Jews,” wrote Primo Levi.

“Palestinians are Jews to Israelis.”

Afterwards, he died in despair, or so we

infer, despairing.

To each nation its Jews, its blacks, its Arabs,

Palestinians, immigrants, its women.

From each nation, its poets: Mahmoud Darwish,

Kavanaugh, Shahid

(who, beloved witness for silenced Kashmir,

cautioned, shift the accent, and he was “martyr”),

Audre Lorde, Neruda, Amichai, Senghor,

and you, June Jordan.

Copyright Credit: Marilyn Hacker, "Elegy for a Soldier" from Desesperanto: Poems 1999-2002. Copyright © 2003 by Marilyn Hacker. Used by permission of the author and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. This selection may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Source: Desperanto: Poems 1999-2002 (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 2003)