Elegy for a Soldier

June Jordan, 1936-2002 I. 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. Top 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.