we are the ones we have been waiting for

::HEART:: June Jordan. Poet, novelist, teacher, human rights activist, journalist. She played a pivitol role in black arts and global politics and is cosidered one of the most significant African America, bisexual authors of our time. Jordan dared to speak out, with fiery honesty, about all that ails us, as blacks and as citizens of the world. She also left us with a haunting battle cry of our generation - "We are the ones we have been waiting for." These words inspired many other works, but, most importantly, Alice Walkers book, of the same name.

Excerpt from We are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For by Alice Walker

"It was the poet June Jordan who wrote 'We are the ones we have been waiting for.' Sweet Honey in the Rock turned those words into a song. Hearing this song, I have witnessed thousands of people rise to their feet in joyful recognition and affirmation. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for because we are able to see what is happening with a much greater awareness than our parents or grandparents, our ancestors, could see..."

Poem for South African Women
BY June Jordan

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.