Poem for Haruko

“Poem for Haruko” by June Jordan originally appeared in the 1994 collection Haruko: Love Poems from High Risk Books. It is also collected in Directed By Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (2005) from Copper Canyon Press. The 29-line poem is written in unrhymed free verse in four stanzas. In the poem, the speaker remembers past moments in an intimate relationship with a now-absent lover. They recall the way the light played through the lover’s hair and a walk on the beach. The speaker considers the emotional fullness of the relationship—the difficulties as well as the joy. At the end of the poem, the speaker acknowledges a change in perspective: While, at one time, they didn’t consider themself someone who would “keep a record” (Line 1) of their past, by the end of the poem, they hold dear the “bitter / and the sweet” (Lines 26-27)—the emotional complexities of remembering a lost love.

Poet Biography

Poet, essayist, playwright, educator, and activist June Jordan was born in Harlem, New York, in 1936, and grew up in Brooklyn. Her parents emigrated from Jamaica. Jordan credits her father for passing on a love of literature and for encouraging her writing; in an interview with Essence magazine, she refers to her father as both “my hero and my tyrant” (Poetry Foundation). Jordan was the only Black student at the prep schools she attended in her teens. She earned a BA from Barnard College. Jordan’s educational experience, in which she was submerged in an exclusively white male literary canon, informs both her prose and poetry, which resist European literary traditions to embrace Black writing and the writings and writers of the New World (a term Jordan uses to replace the derogatory designation “Third World”).

Jordan published 27 books of poetry and prose in her lifetime, with two additional books published posthumously. In both her written work and her teaching, Jordan celebrated and encouraged Black English as a powerful cultural and artistic expression. Jordan openly identified as bisexual despite social and political bigotry. She raised a son who has a diverse racial background amid similar bias against diverse families. Throughout her career, Jordan coupled resistance with love to open and claim social, political, and artistic space.

Jordan’s teaching career spanned institutions including City College of New York, Yale University, and Sarah Lawrence College. She directed the Poetry Center at SUNY at Stony Brook for many years before becoming a full professor of English, Women’s Studies, and African American Studies at UC Berkeley in 1989, where she taught until her death in 2002. In 1991, Jordan founded her groundbreaking program “Poetry for the People.”

In 2019, Jordan’s name was added to the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor within the Stonewall National Monument in New York City. Other honors include a Rockefeller grant, an American Academy in Rome Environmental Design Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a MacDowell fellowship, and many more. She was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the PEN Center USA West Freedom to Write Award. Though Jordan identified as bisexual, Directed by Desire: Collected Poems (2005) won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry in 2005, an event that prompted the inclusion of a Bisexual category in 2006.

Poem Text

Jordan, June. “Poem for Haruko.” 2005. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

June Jordan’s “Poem for Haruko” begins with an admission: “I never thought I’d keep a record” (Line 1). In the first stanza, the speaker goes on to compare this record-keeping with an image of candlelight illuminating their beloved’s hair—an image that is also a memory. In the speaker’s memory, the candlelit hair becomes fire itself, and divine.

In the second stanza the speaker makes another admission: “But now I do” (Line 10), referring to the action of storing and later retrieving images from memory, of keeping an account of the past. In this memory, the speaker and their beloved are on a beach, strolling hand-in-hand, eating fruit, and having the occasional smoke.

In the third stanza the speaker recalls a bittersweet memory—“an evening of retreat” (Line 20)—and the loss of a passionate relationship. In the final couplet, the speaker is alone, yearning for their absent lover, and pointedly remembering both the pleasure and the agony of intimacy.