David Corn, rock star!

Unfortunately,
David corn and his press associates have it wrong here. Barak Obama's "we are the ones we've been waiting for" may be new to many, but it origin is the last line of a poem by June Jordan, noted jamaican-american and woman activist. The poem is called:
Poem for South African Women

Our own shadows disappear as the feet of thousands
by the tens of thousands pound the fallow land
into new dust that
rising like a marvelous pollen will be
fertile
even as the first woman whispering
imagination to the trees around her made
for righteous fruit
from such deliberate defense of life
as no other still
will claim inferior to any other safety
in the world

The whispers too they
intimate to the inmost ear of every spirit
now aroused they
carousing in ferocious affirmation
of all peaceable and loving amplitude
sound a certainly unbounded heat
from a baptismal smoke where yes
there will be fire

And the babies cease alarm as mothers
raising arms
and heart high as the stars so far unseen
nevertheless hurl into the universe
a moving force
irreversible as light years
traveling to the open eye

And who will join this standing up
and the ones who stood without sweet company
will sing and sing
back into the mountains and
if necessary
even under the sea:

we are the ones we have been waiting for.

Just a note - "We are the ones we have been waiting for" is not a "new line" that Obama came up with. To my knowledge, it's from Alice Walker, but it may even predate her use of it. Just want to give credit where it's due...no beef with Obama or David Corn!

Oops, didn't refresh before I posted. Thanks for the source. I thought maybe Alice Walker's book of the same name wasn't the original source, but I wasn't sure.

Thanks to Dave for informing me--and us--about the origins of that line. I should have caught that. But it's been years since I've read Jordan's work.

How ironic that Obama was caught yet again plagiarizing and this time from a woman poet. So glad somebody caught it.
The words sound so good sometimes rolling off someone's tongue, but the real attraction to that quote is the opposite of delegating one's political choices to a public figure. It's the simultaneous coming to consciousness of INDIVIDUALS and that is NOT what is happening "on the campaign trail".