Revolutionary Petunias (3 page)

slithery,

from my throat.

Allow me to press them upon

your fingers,

as you have pressed

that bloody voice of yours

in places it could not know

to speak,

nor how to trust.

*
A childhood bully.

No doubt she was a singer

of naughty verse

and hated judgments

(black and otherwise)

and wove a life

of stunning contradiction,

was driven mad

by obvious

professions

and the word

“sister”

hissed by snakes

belly-low,

poisonous,

in the grass.

Waiting with sex

or tongue

to strike.

Behold the brothers!

They strut behind

the casket

wan and sad

and murderous.

Thinking whom

to blame

for making this girl

die

alone, lashed

denied

into her room.

This girl who would not lie;

and was not born

to be “correct.”

Did you hear?

After everything

the Old Warrior Terror

died a natural death at home,

in bed.

Just reward

for having proclaimed abroad

that True Believers never

doubt;

True Revolutionaries never

smile.

Follow the train full of bodies;

listening in the tiny wails

for reassurance of your mighty

right. Ride up and down the gorges

on your horse

collecting scalps.

Your creed is simple, and even

true: We learn from each other

by doing. Period.

Judge every one with perfect calm.

Stand this man here and that one

there;

mouths begging open holes.

Let them curtsey into the ditch

dug before them.

They will not recall tomorow

your judgment of today.

The quietly pacifist peaceful

always die

to make room for men

who shout. Who tell lies to

children, and crush the corners

off of old men’s dreams.

And now I find your name,

scrawled large in someone’s

blood, on this survival

list.

He said come

Let me exploit you;

Somebody must do it

And wouldn’t you

Prefer a brother?

Come, show me your

Face,

All scarred with tears;

Unburden your heart—

Before the opportunity

Passes away.

…Or maybe the purpose of being

here, wherever we are, is to increase

the durability and the occasions of

love among and between peoples. Love,

as the concentration of tender caring

and tender excitement, or love as the

reasons for joy. I believe that love

is the single, true prosperity of any

moment and that whatever and whoever

impedes, diminishes, ridicules, opposes

the development of loving spirit is

“wrong” /hateful.

—June Jordan

The man who slowly walked away from

them was a king in their society. A day

had come when he had decided that he

did not need any kingship other than the

kind of wife everybody would loathe

from the bottom of their hearts. He had

planned for that loathing in secret;

they had absorbed the shock in secret.

When everything was exposed, they had

only one alternative: to keep their prejudice

and pretend Maru had died.

—Bessie Head,
Maru

Your eyes are widely open flowers.

Only their centers are darkly clenched

To conceal Mysteries

That lure me to a keener blooming

Than I know,

And promise a secret

I must have.

I

the gift he gave unknowing

she already had

though feebly

lost

a planted thing

within herself

scarcely green

nearly severed

till he came

a magic root

sleeping beneath

branches

long grown wild.

II

and when she thought of him

seated in the dentist’s chair

she thought she understood

the hole she

discovered through

her tongue

as mysteries in

separate boxes

the space between them

charged

waiting till the feeling

should return.

III

but she was known to be

unwise

and lovesick lover of motionless

things

wood and bits of clever

stone

a tree she cared for swayed overhead

in swoon

but would not follow

her.

IV

and his fingers peeled

the coolness off

her mind

his flower eyes crushed her

till

she bled.

You intend no doubt

to give me nothing,

and are not aware

the gift has already been

received.

Curse me then,

and take away

the spell.

For I am rich;

no cheap and ragged

beggar

but a queen,

to rouse the king

I need in you.

The odd stillness of your body

excites a madness

in me.

I burn to know what it is like

awake.

Arching, rolling

across

my sky.

Your quiet litheness

as you move across the room is

a drug

that pulls me

under;

your leaving slays me.

Clutter-up people

casually track

the immaculate

corridor/passion

of my death

and blacken the empty air

with talk of war,

and other too comprehensible

things.

I wish to own only the warmth

of your skin

the sound your thoughts make

reverberating off the coldness

of my loss

to love you purely

as I love trees and

the quiet sheens and

colors

of my house

my heart is full

of charity

of fair play

although on other

occasions

it has been acknowledged

I am a thief.

It does not impress me that I have

a mind.

Chance amuses me.

Coincidence makes me laugh

out loud.

Fate weighs me down

too heavy.

When I can’t bear not seeing

you another second,

I send out my

will;

when it brings us face to

face,

there’s
an invisible power

I respect!

In me there is a rage to defy

the order of the stars

despite their pretty patterns.

To see if Gods who hold forth now

on human thrones

can will away my lust

to dare

and press to order the anarchy

I would serve.

The silence between your words

rams into me

like a sword.

Throughout the storm and party

you chose to act the child

a two-year-old as distant as

the moon.

But our thunder and lightning God

obscured the age,

revealed the play,

and distinctly your age-old glance

shook the room.

Your name scrawled on a bit of paper moves me.

And I should beware.

Take my dreaming self beyond the reach

of your cheery letters,

written laboriously with

stubby pencils and grubby

nails.

: What the finger writes the soul can read :

All life was spirit once

a disembodied groping across

the void;

toward the unknown otherness

the flesh is weak and slow

with luck I shall not live there

anymore.

They say you are not for me,

and I try, in my resolved but

barely turning brain,

to know “they” do not matter,

these relics of past disasters

in march against the rebellion

of our time.

They will fail;

as all the others have:

for our fate
will not
be this:

to smile and salute the pain,

to limp behind their steel boot

of happiness,

grieving for forbidden things.

Go where you will.

Take the long lashes

that guard your eyes

and sweep a path

across this earth;

but see if it is not true

that voluptuous blood,

though held to the tinkling

quiet of a choked back

stream,

will yet rush out

to aid shy love,

and flood out the brain

to make a clean

and sacred place

for itself;

though there is no fixed place

on earth for man

or woman.

It will not help

that you believe

in miracles.

I have learned not to worry about love;

but to honor its coming

with all my heart.

To examine the dark mysteries

of the blood

with headless heed and

swirl,

to know the rush of feelings

swift and flowing

as water.

The source appears to be

some inexhaustible

spring

within our twin and triple

selves;

the new face I turn up

to you

no one else on earth

has ever

seen.

And for ourselves, the intrinsic

“Purpose” is to reach, and to remember,

and to declare our commitment to all

the living, without deceit, and without

fear, and without reservation. We do

what we can. And by doing it, we keep

ourselves trusting, which is to say,

vulnerable, and more than that,

what can anyone ask?

—June Jordan, in a personal letter, 1970

for Mel

While love is unfashionable

let us live

unfashionably.

Seeing the world

a complex ball

in small hands;

love our blackest garment.

Let us be poor

in all but truth, and courage

handed down

by the old

spirits.

Let us be intimate with

ancestral ghosts

and music

of the undead.

While love is dangerous

let us walk bareheaded

beside the Great River.

Let us gather blossoms

under fire.

We reach for destinies beyond

what we have come to know

and in the romantic hush

of promises

perceive each

the other’s life

as known mystery.

Shared. But inviolate.

No melting. No squeezing

into One.

We swing our eyes around

as well as side to side

to see the world.

To choose, renounce,

this, or that—

call it a council between equals

call it love.

Rebellious. Living.

Against the Elemental Crush.

A Song of Color

Blooming

For Deserving Eyes.

Blooming Gloriously

For its Self.

Revolutionary Petunia.

Alice Walker (b. 1944), one of the United States’ preeminent writers, is an award-winning author of novels, stories, essays, and poetry. Walker was the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, which she won in 1983 for her novel
The Color Purple
, also a National Book Award winner. Walker has also contributed to American culture as an activist, teacher, and public intellectual. In both her writing and her public life, Walker has worked to address problems of injustice, inequality, and poverty.

Walker was born at home in Putnam County, Georgia, on February 9, 1944, the eighth child of Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Tallulah Grant Walker. Willie Lee and Minnie Lou labored as tenant farmers, and Minnie Lou supplemented the family income as a house cleaner. Though poor, Walker’s parents raised her to appreciate art, nature, and beauty. They also taught her to value her education, encouraging her to focus on her studies. When she was a young girl, Alice’s brother accidentally shot her in the eye with a BB, leaving a large scar and causing her to withdraw into the world of art and books. Walker’s dedication to learning led her to graduate from her high school as valedictorian. She was also homecoming queen.

Walker began attending Spelman College in Atlanta in 1961. There she formed bonds with professors such as Staughton Lynd and Howard Zinn, teachers that would inspire her to pursue her talent for writing and her commitment to social justice. In 1964 she transferred to Sarah Lawrence College, where she completed a collection of poems in her senior year. This collection would later become her first published book,
Once
(1965). After college, Walker became deeply engaged with the civil rights movement, often joining marches and voter registration drives in the South. In 1965 she met Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal, a civil rights lawyer, whom she would marry in 1967 in New York. The two were happy, before the strain of being an interracial couple in Mississippi caused them to separate in 1976. They had one child, Rebecca Grant Walker Leventhal.