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a June Jordan portfolio
- from Who Look at Me
- If You Saw a Negro Lady
- What Would I Do White
- These Poems
- One Minus One Minus One
- I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies
- Poem for South African Women
- Alla Tha's All Right, but
- Poem about My Rights
- Poem for Nana
- First Poem After Serious Surgery
- The Bombing of Baghdad
- Poem to Take Back the Night
- It's Hard to Keep a Clean Shirt Clean
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If You Saw a Negro Lady
If you saw a Negro lady sitting on a Tuesday near the whirl-sludge doors of Horn & Hardart on the main drag of downtown Brooklyn solitary and conspicuous as plain and neat as walls impossible to fresco and you watched her self- conscious features shape about a Horn & Hardart teaspoon with a pucker from a cartoon she would not understand with spine as straight and solid as her years of bending over floors allowed skin cleared of interest by a ruthless soap nails square and yellowclean from metal files sitting in a forty-year-old-flush of solitude and prickling from the new white cotton blouse concealing nothing she had ever noticed even when she bathed and never hummed a bathtub tune nor knew one If you saw her square above the dirty mopped-on antiseptic floors before the rag-wiped table tops little finger broad and stiff in heavy emulation of a cockney mannerism would you turn her treat into surprise observing happy birthday from Some Changes (1971) and from Directed by Desire. The Collected Poems of June Jordan. Copyright 2005 by the June M. Jordan Literary Estate Trust |