Poem for Haruko

“Poem for Haruko” by June Jordan is a love poem. Originally published in the 1994 collection Haruko: Love Poems from High Risk Books, the poem also appears in Directed By Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (2005). Written in unrhymed free verse, the poem consists of three stanzas containing nine lines each, plus a final couplet. Line lengths vary widely throughout the poem. The speaker speaks from a first-person point of view. It is a love poem but for a beloved who is no longer present; in this way the mood of the poem is elegiac, or melancholy.

In the first line of the poem, the speaker says, “I never thought I’d keep a record” (Line 1), which indicates the speaker has undergone a change. The implication is that the speaker’s former (younger) self was not the type to document life as it was happening. She didn’t think herself the kind of person who would keep track of every high and low, to preserve life’s moments of joy and sorrow for perusal at some distant, less vital future moment. For the speaker, “a record” (Line 1) looks less like a bookkeeping ledger than a vision: “candles lighting the entire soft lace / of the air” (Lines 3-4).