Anchorage
for Audre Lorde
This city is made of stone, of blood, and fish.
There are Chugatch Mountains to the east
and whale and seal to the west.
It hasn't always been this way, because glaciers
who are ice ghosts create oceans, carve earth
and shape this city here, by the sound.
They swim backwards in time.
Once a storm of boiling earth cracked open
the streets, threw open the town.
It's quiet now, but underneath the concrete
is the cooking earth,
and above that, air
which is another ocean, where spirits we can't see
are dancing joking getting full
on roasted caribou, and the praying
goes on, extends out.
Nora and I go walking down 4th Avenue
and know it is all happening.
On a park bench we see someone's Athabascan
grandmother, folded up, smelling like 200 years
of blood and piss, her eyes closed against some
unimagined darkness, where she is buried in an ache
in which nothing makes
sense.
We keep on breathing, walking, but softer now,
the clouds whirling in the air above us.
What can we say that would make us understand
better than we do already?
Except to speak of her home and claim her
as our own history, and know that our dreams
don't end here, two blocks away from the ocean
where our hearts still batter away at the muddy shore.
And I think of the 6th Avenue jail, of mostly Native
and Black men, where Henry told about being shot at
eight times outside a liquor store in L.A., but when
the car sped away he was surprised he was alive,
no bullet holes, man, and eight cartridges strewn
on the sidewalk
all around him.
Everyone laughed at the impossibility of it,
but also the truth. Because who would believe
the fantastic and terrible story of all of our survival
those who were never meant
to survive?
-Joy Harjo
Used by permission.
From She Had Some Horses
(W.W. Norton & Company, 2008).
(W.W. Norton & Company, 2008).
Joy Harjo
was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma and is an internationally known poet,
performer, writer, and saxophone player of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation. Her
seven books of poetry include How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems 1975 - 2002, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, and She Had Some Horses, all published by W.W. Norton. Her most recent books are a memoir, Crazy Brave (W.W. Norton, 2012), and Soul Talk, Song Language Conversations with Joy Harjo (Wesleyan
Press, 2011). Her poetry has garnered many awards including the New
Mexico Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Lifetime
Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas, 1998
Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award, and the William Carlos Williams
Award from the Poetry Society of America. Harjo co-edited an anthology
of contemporary Native women's writing: Reinventing the Enemy's Language: Native Women's Writing of North America,
one of the London Observer's Best Books of 1997, and has written
award-winning books for children and young adults. Harjo also performs a
one-woman show, "Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light," which
premiered at the Wells Fargo Theater in Los Angeles in 2009 with other
performances at the Public Theater in NYC and LaJolla Playhouse. She
writes a column "Comings and Goings" for her tribal newspaper, the
Muscogee Nation News and lives in Glenpool, OK.
