Poem of the Week: Joy Harjo

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).

 

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.