Patriotism

Moving forward can still be a choice, even if it's inevitable

Here we are, four months into 2025, tax day, and I have yet to write anything for this newsletter. It is a poetry-themed newsletter, after all, and I have not been feeling especially poetic of late. I have postponed my Zoom poetry workshop, I have written very few poems, and all my recent reading has been of the self-help variety. Of course, you can read all of my past posts, but that doesn’t seem very SEO algorithmic of you. Things have been crappy.

But it is also National Poetry Month, so it is my patriotic duty to force the issue.

Recently, I was asked to read a poem to start a meeting of an Independent Political Organization I joined in my Chicago Ward (trying to affect more change than writing scathing social media posts about various politicians). The poem I proposed I would read is June Jordan’s “I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies” - here it is:

1
I will no longer lightly walk behind
a one of you who fear me:
Be afraid.
I plan to give you reasons for your jumpy fits
and facial tics
I will not walk politely on the pavements anymore
and this is dedicated in particular
to those who hear my footsteps
or the insubstantial rattling of my grocery
cart
then turn around
see me
and hurry on
away from this impressive terror I must be:
I plan to blossom bloody on an afternoon
surrounded by my comrades singing
terrible revenge in merciless
accelerating
rhythms
But
I have watched a blind man studying his face.
I have set the table in the evening and sat down
to eat the news.
Regularly
I have gone to sleep.
There is no one to forgive me.
The dead do not give a damn.
I live like a lover
who drops her dime into the phone
just as the subway shakes into the station
wasting her message
canceling the question of her call:
fulminating or forgetful but late
and always after the fact that could save or
condemn me

I must become the action of my fate.

2
How many of my brothers and my sisters
will they kill
before I teach myself
retaliation?
Shall we pick a number?
South Africa for instance:
do we agree that more than ten thousand
in less than a year but that less than
five thousand slaughtered in more than six
months will
WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH ME?

I must become a menace to my enemies.

3
And if I
if I ever let you slide
who should be extirpated from my universe
who should be cauterized from earth
completely
(lawandorder jerkoffs of the first the
terrorist degree)
then let my body fail my soul
in its bedeviled lecheries

And if I
if I ever let love go
because the hatred and the whisperings
become a phantom dictate I o-
bey in lieu of impulse and realities
(the blossoming flamingos of my
wild mimosa trees)
then let love freeze me
out.
I must become
I must become a menace to my enemies.

I love this poem because it resists passivity and re-asserts our agency in ours and our beloved’s fates. Fight for your beliefs, god dammit.

The organizer who asked me to read it said he was hoping for something a little more uplifting and that maybe a white guy reading this poem might not hit the same way as if it were read by a black woman, or even a non-white guy. That’s all fair. But for me, it IS uplifting to say that you are not crazy for watching your enemies behave monstrously and that you should intervene. Don’t become a bystander to injustices big and small.

Also, it is precisely because things have been crappy that returning to poems is a not a self-pitying activity. I must become/I must become a menace to my enemies. Even when those enemies are my own poor choices.

Happy New Year!