Poem of the Week: Natalie Diaz

       

Why I Don't Mention Flowers When Conversations with My Brother Reach Uncomfortable Silences

Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing

                              flowers home.

--Wislawa Szymborska

In the Kashmir mountains,

my brother shot many men,

blew skulls from brown skins,

dyed white desert sand crimson.

What is there to say to a man

who has traversed such a world,

whose hands and eyes have

betrayed him?

Were there flowers there? I asked.

This is what he told me:

In a village, many men

wrapped a woman in a sheet.

She didn't struggle.

Her bare feet dragged in the dirt.

They laid her in the road

and stoned her.

The first man was her father.

He threw two stones in a row.

Her brother had filled his pockets

with stones on the way there.

The crowd was a hive

of disturbed bees. The volley

of stones against her body

drowned out her moans.

Blood burst through the sheet

like a patch of violets,

a hundred roses in bloom.

-Natalie Diaz

  

Used by permission.

From When My Brother Was an Aztec (Copper Canyon Press, 2012)  

Natalie Diaz grew up in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Community. After playing professional basketball in Europe and Asia for several years, she completed her MFA in poetry and fiction at Old Dominion University. She was awarded the Bread Loaf 2012 Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry, the 2012 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Literature Fellowship, a 2012 Lannan Residency, as well as being awarded a 2012 Lannan Literary Fellowship. She won a Pushcart Prize in 2013. Her first book, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published in 2012 by Copper Canyon Press. She lives in Mohave Valley, AZ, and directs a language revitalization program at Fort Mojave, her home reservation. There she works and teaches with the last Elder speakers of the Mojave language.

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