About Jourdan Keith

from the ground up is about grass roots union of the arts, community, and good times. It is a Seattle-based organization that publishes a literary journal, "when it rains from the ground up", and hosts a reading series known as “A Night of Cheap Wine and Poetry.” Since its inception in May 2005, the group has struck a match to Seattle’s literary scene, lighting up and presenting its biggest and hippest reading series as well as publishing local and national poets and writers from Jourdan Keith to Lyn Lifshin.

Website: www.cheapwineandpoetry.com
Email: fromthegroundupfoundation@gmail.com

Bio:

Poet, naturalist, educator and storyteller, Jourdan Keith is a 2006 Jack Straw Writer’s Program recipient. Her work blends political, personal and natural landscapes to offer voices from the margins of American lives. In 2004 she was awarded an individual artists grant from the Mayor's Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs for the choreopoem, The Uterine Files: Episode I, Voices Spitting Out Rainbows. Her publication credits include magazines, newspapers, radio, television, the video Silence…Broken, and the anthology, Ma-Ka, Diasporic Juks. (Sister Vision Press). She is the Founder and Director of Urban Wilderness Project, www.urbanwildernessproject.org which provides storytelling, restoration, adventure and wilderness programming.

Enough of Us
by Jourdan Keith

Maybe we will be too tired for war.
Maybe enough of us will remember out loud,
Vietnam
and the other stories our fathers did not tell.

Maybe enough of us
will remember, make our own war memorials,
erect fathers absent from childhood
sculpt faces absent from the table of their lives.

Maybe enough of us
will remember stumbling through elementary school hallways,
stepping over the land mine images
of Coca-Cola jingles that taught the world to sing
or our mothers huddled by telephones breaking the silent
cadence of body counts and bullets, body counts and bullets with humbled whispers, thank God the war is over.

Maybe enough of us
will remember the taste of shrapnel,
the lips of cauliflower men
who returned vegetable kisses,
whose dinner time voices turned from the friendly fire of the evening news
to the fragging of their families,
who returned from My Lai men who could not stop the war.

Maybe enough of us will remember
and fill the streets with peace instead of blood for oil.