Joy Harjo

At dawn the panther of the heavens peers over the edge of the world. She hears the stars gossip with the sun, sees the moon washing her lean darkness with water electrified by prayers. All over the world there are those who can't sleep, those who never awaken. My granddaughter sleeps on the breast of her mother with milk on her mouth. A fly contemplates the sweetness of lactose. Her father is wrapped in the blanket of nightmares. For safety he approaches the red hills near Thoreau. They recognize him and sing for him. Her mother has business in the house of chaos. She is a prophet dis- guised as a young mother who is looking for a job. She appears at the door of my dreams and we put the house back together. Panther watches as human and animal souls are lifted to the heavens by rain clouds to partake of songs of beautiful thunder. Others are led by deer and antelope in the wistful hours to the vil- lages of their ancestors. There they eat cornmeal cooked with berries that stain their lips with purple while the tree of life flickers in the sun. It's October, though the season before dawn is always winter. On the city streets of this desert town lit by chemical yellow travelers search for home. Some have been drinking and intimate with strangers. Others are escapees from the night shift, sip lukewarm coffee, shift gears to the other side of darkness. One woman stops at a red light, turns over a worn tape to the last chorus of a whispery blues. She has decided to live another day. The stars take notice, as do the half-asleep flowers, prickly pear and chinaberry tree who drink exhaust into their roots, into the earth. She guns the light to home where her children are asleep and may never know she ever left. That their fate took a turn in the land of nightmares toward the sun may be untouchable knowledge. It is a sweet sound. The panther relative yawns and puts her head between her paws. She dreams of the house of panthers and the seven steps to grace.

You can’t begin just anywhere. It’s a wreck. Shrapnel and the eye Of a house, a row of houses. There’s a rat scrambling From light with fleshy trash in its mouth. A baby strapped to its mother’s back Cut loose. Soldiers crawl the city, The river, the town, the village, The bedroom, our kitchen. They eat everything. Or burn it. They kill what they cannot take. They rape. What they cannot kill they take. Rumors fall like rain. Like bombs. Like mother and father tears swallowed for restless peace. Like sunset slanting toward a moonless midnight. Like a train blown free of its destination.         Like a seed fallen where There is no chance of trees                 or anyplace       for birds to live. No, start here.                           Deer peer from the edge of the woods. We used to see woodpeckers The size of the sun, redbirds, and were greeted By chickadees with their good morning songs. We’d started to cook outside slippery with dew and laughter, ah those smoky sweet sunrises. We tried to pretend war wasn’t going to happen. Though they began building their houses all around us and demanding 
more. They started teaching our children their god’s story, A story in which we’d always be slaves. No. Not here. You can’t begin here. This is memory shredded because it is impossible to hold by words, even poetry.

for Darlene Wind and James Welch I think of Wind and her wild ways the year we had nothing to lose and lost it anyway in the cursed country of the fox. We still talk about that winter, how the cold froze imaginary buffalo on the stuffed horizon of snowbanks. The haunting voices of the starved and mutilated broke fences, crashed our thermostat dreams, and we couldn’t stand it one more time. So once again we lost a winter in stubborn memory, walked through cheap apartment walls, skated through fields of ghosts into a town that never wanted us, in the epic search for grace. Like Coyote, like Rabbit, we could not contain our terror and clowned our way through a season of false midnights. We had to swallow that town with laughter, so it would go down easy as honey. And one morning as the sun struggled to break ice, and our dreams had found us with coffee and pancakes in a truck stop along Highway 80, we found grace. I could say grace was a woman with time on her hands, or a white buffalo escaped from memory. But in that dingy light it was a promise of balance. We once again understood the talk of animals, and spring was lean and hungry with the hope of children and corn. I would like to say, with grace, we picked ourselves up and walked into the spring thaw. We didn’t; the next season was worse. You went home to Leech Lake to work with the tribe and I went south. And, Wind, I am still crazy. I know there is something larger than the memory of a dispossessed people. We have seen it.

In the United terminal in Chicago at five on a Friday afternoon The sky is breaking with rain and wind and all the flights Are delayed forever. We will never get to where we are going And there’s no way back to where we’ve been. The sun and the moon have disappeared to an island far from 
anywhere. Everybody has a heartache — The immense gatekeeper of Gate Z–100 keeps his cool. This guardian of the sky teases me and makes me smile through the mess, Building up his airline by stacking it against the company I usually travel: Come on over to our side, we’ll treat you nice. I laugh as he hands me back my ticket, then he turns to charm The next customer, his feet tired in his minimum wage shoes. Everybody has a heartache — The man with his head bobbing to music no one else can hear has that satisfied Feel — a full belly of sweet and a wife who sings heartache to sleep. In his luggage (that will be lost and never found) is a musty dream of flying Solo to Africa, with a stop on the return to let go the stories too difficult to Carry home. He’ll take off his shoes to walk in a warm, tropical sea. He’ll sing to the ancestors: Take me home to mama. No one cooks like her. But all the mamas worked to the bone gone too young. Broken by The Man. Everybody has a heartache — Everyone’s mouthing fried, sweet, soft and fat, While we wait for word in the heart of the scrambled beast. The sparkle of soda wets the dream core. That woman over there the color of broth did what she was told. It’s worked out well as can be expected in a world Where she was no beauty queen and was never seen, Always in the back of someplace in the back — She holds the newest baby. He has croup. Shush, shush. Go to sleep, my little baby sheepie. He sits up front of her with his new crop of teeth. Everybody has a heartache — This man speaks to no one, but his body does. Half his liver is swollen with anger; the other half is trying To apologize — What a mess I’ve made of history, he thinks without thinking. Mother coming through the screen door, her clothes torn, Whimpering:It’s okay baby, please don’t cry. Don’t cry. Baby don’t cry.

To pray you open your whole self To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon To one whole voice that is you. And know there is more That you can’t see, can’t hear; Can’t know except in moments Steadily growing, and in languages That aren’t always sound but other Circles of motion. Like eagle that Sunday morning Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky In wind, swept our hearts clean With sacred wings. We see you, see ourselves and know That we must take the utmost care And kindness in all things. Breathe in, knowing we are made of All this, and breathe, knowing We are truly blessed because we Were born, and die soon within a True circle of motion, Like eagle rounding out the morning Inside us. We pray that it will be done In beauty. In beauty.

Don’t bother the earth spirit who lives here. She is working on a story. It is the oldest story in the world and it is delicate, changing. If she sees you watching she will invite you in for coffee, give you warm bread, and you will be obligated to stay and listen. But this is no ordinary story. You will have to endure earthquakes, lightning, the deaths of all those you love, the most blinding beauty. It’s a story so compelling you may never want to leave; this is how she traps you. See that stone finger over there? That is the only one who ever escaped.

I am the holy being of my mother's prayer and my father's song — Norman Patrick Brown, Dineh Poet and Speaker 1. SET CONFLICT RESOLUTION GROUND RULES: Recognize whose lands these are on which we stand. Ask the deer, turtle, and the crane. Make sure the spirits of these lands are respected and treated with goodwill. The land is a being who remembers everything. You will have to answer to your children, and their children, and theirs— The red shimmer of remembering will compel you up the night to walk the perimeter of truth for understanding. As I brushed my hair over the hotel sink to get ready I heard: By listening we will understand who we are in this holy realm of words. Do not parade, pleased with yourself. You must speak in the language of justice. 2. USE EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION SKILLS THAT DISPLAY AND ENHANCE MUTUAL TRUST AND RESPECT: If you sign this paper we will become brothers. We will no longer fight. We will give you this land and these waters "as long as the grass shall grow and the rivers run." The lands and waters they gave us did not belong to them to give. Under false pretenses we signed. After drugging by drink, we signed. With a mass of gunpower pointed at us, we signed. With a flotilla of war ships at our shores, we signed. We are still signing. We have found no peace in this act of signing. A casino was raised up over the gravesite of our ancestors. Our own distant cousins pulled up the bones of grandparents, parents, and grandchildren from their last sleeping place. They had forgotten how to be human beings. Restless winds emerged from the earth when the graves were open and the winds went looking for justice. If you raise this white flag of peace, we will honor it. At Sand Creek several hundred women, children, and men were slaughtered in an unspeakable massacre, after a white flag was raised. The American soldiers trampled the white flag in the blood of the peacemakers. There is a suicide epidemic among native children. It is triple the rate of the rest of America. "It feels like wartime," said a child welfare worker in South Dakota. If you send your children to our schools we will train them to get along in this changing world. We will educate them. We had no choice. They took our children. Some ran away and froze to death. If they were found they were dragged back to the school and punished. They cut their hair, took away their language, until they became as strangers to themselves even as they became strangers to us. If you sign this paper we will become brothers. We will no longer fight. We will give you this land and these waters in exchange "as long as the grass shall grow and the rivers run." Put your hand on this bible, this blade, this pen, this oil derrick, this gun and you will gain trust and respect with us. Now we can speak together as one. We say, put down your papers, your tools of coercion, your false promises, your posture of superiority and sit with us before the fire. We will share food, songs, and stories. We will gather beneath starlight and dance, and rise together at sunrise. The sun rose over the Potomac this morning, over the city surrounding the white house. It blazed scarlet, a fire opening truth. White House, or Chogo Hvtke, means the house of the peacekeeper, the keepers of justice. We have crossed this river to speak to the white leader for peace many times Since these settlers first arrived in our territory and made this their place of governance. These streets are our old trails, curved to fit around trees. 3. GIVE CONSTRUCTIVE FEEDBACK: We speak together with this trade language of English. This trade language enables us to speak across many language boundaries. These languages have given us the poets: Ortiz, Silko, Momaday, Alexie, Diaz, Bird, Woody, Kane, Bitsui, Long Soldier, White, Erdrich, Tapahonso, Howe, Louis, Brings Plenty, okpik, Hill, Wood, Maracle, Cisneros, Trask, Hogan, Dunn, Welch, Gould... The 1957 Chevy is unbeatable in style. My broken-down one-eyed Ford will have to do. It holds everyone: Grandma and grandpa, aunties and uncles, the children and the babies, and all my boyfriends. That's what she said, anyway, as she drove off for the Forty-Nine with all of us in that shimmying wreck. This would be no place to be without blues, jazz—Thank you/mvto to the Africans, the Europeans sitting in, especially Adolphe Sax with his saxophones... Don't forget that at the center is the Mvskoke ceremonial circles. We know how to swing. We keep the heartbeat of the earth in our stomp dance feet. You might try dancing theory with a bustle, or a jingle dress, or with turtles strapped around your legs. You might try wearing colonization like a heavy gold chain around a pimp's neck. 4. REDUCE DEFENSIVENESS AND BREAK THE DEFENSIVENESS CHAIN: I could hear the light beings as they entered every cell. Every cell is a house of the god of light, they said. I could hear the spirits who love us stomp dancing. They were dancing as if they were here, and then another level of here, and then another, until the whole earth and sky was dancing. We are here dancing, they said. There was no there. There was no  "I"  or "you." There was us; there was "we." There we were as if we were the music. You cannot legislate music to lockstep nor can you legislate the spirit of the music to stop at political boundaries— —Or poetry, or art, or anything that is of value or matters in this world, and the next worlds. This is about getting to know each other. We will wind up back at the blues standing on the edge of the flatted fifth about to jump into a fierce understanding together. 5. ELIMINATE NEGATIVE ATTITUDES DURING CONFLICT: A panther poised in the cypress tree about to jump is a panther poised in a cypress tree about to jump. The panther is a poem of fire green eyes and a heart charged by four winds of four directions. The panther hears everything in the dark: the unspoken tears of a few hundred human years, storms that will break what has broken his world, a bluebird swaying on a branch a few miles away. He hears the death song of his approaching prey: I will always love you, sunrise. I belong to the black cat with fire green eyes. There, in the cypress tree near the morning star. 6. AND, USE WHAT YOU LEARN TO RESOLVE YOUR OWN CONFLICTS AND TO MEDIATE OTHERS' CONFLICTS: When we made it back home, back over those curved roads that wind through the city of peace, we stopped at the doorway of dusk as it opened to our homelands. We gave thanks for the story, for all parts of the story because it was by the light of those challenges we knew ourselves— We asked for forgiveness. We laid down our burdens next to each other.

Knoxville, December 27, 2016, for Marilyn Kallet’s 70th birthday. This poem was constructed to carry any memory you want to hold close. We arrived when the days grew legs of night. Chocolates were offered. We ate latkes for hours to celebrate light and friends. We will keep going despite dark or a madman in a white house dream. Let’s talk about something else said the dog who begs faithfully at the door of goodwill: a biscuit will do, a voice of reason, meat sticks — I dreamed all of this I told her, you, me, and Paris — it was impossible to make it through the tragedy without poetry. What are we without winds becoming words? Becoming old children born to children born to sing us into love. Another level of love, beyond the neighbor’s holiday light display proclaiming goodwill to all men who have lost their way in the dark as they tried to find the car door, the bottle hidden behind the seat, reason to keep on going past all the times they failed at sharing love, love. It’s weak they think — or some romantic bullshit, a movie set propped up behind on slats, said the wizard of junk understanding who pretends to be the wise all-knowing dog behind a cheap fan. It’s in the plan for the new world straining to break through the floor of this one, said the Angel of All-That-You-Know-and-Forgot-and-Will-Find, as she flutters the edge of your mind when you try to sing the blues to the future of everything that might happen and will. All the losses come tumbling down, down, down at three in the morning as do all the shouldn’t-haves or should-haves. It doesn’t matter, girl — I’ll be here to pick you up, said Memory, in her red shoes, and the dress that showed off brown legs. When you met him at the age you have always loved, hair perfect with a little wave, and that shine in your skin from believing what was impossible was possible, you were not afraid. You stood up in love in a French story and there fell ever a light rain as you crossed the Seine to meet him for café in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. You wrote a poem beneath the tender skin from your ribs to your hip bone, in the slender then, and you are still writing that song to convince the sweetness of every bit of straggling moonlight, star and sunlight to become words in your mouth, in your kiss — that kiss that will never die, you will all ways fall in love. It doesn’t matter how old, how many days, hours, or memories, we can fall in love over and over again. The Seine or Tennessee or any river with a soul knows the depths descending when it comes to seeing the sun or moon stare back, without shame, remorse, or guilt. This is what I remember she told her husband when they bedded down that night in the house that would begin marriage. That house was built of twenty-four doves, rugs from India, cooking recipes from seven generations of mothers and their sisters, and wave upon wave of tears, and the concrete of resolution for the steps that continue all the way to the heavens, past guardian dogs, dog after dog to protect. They are humble earth angels, and the rowdiest, even nasty. You try and lick yourself like that, imagine. And the Old Woman laughed as she slipped off her cheap shoes and parked them under the bed that lies at the center of the garden of good and evil. She’d seen it all. Done it more than once. Tonight, she just wanted a good sleep, and picked up the book of poetry by her bed, which was over a journal she kept when her mother was dying. These words from May Sarton she kept in the fourth room of her heart, “Love, come upon him warily and deep / For if he startle first it were as well / to bind a fox’s throat with a gold bell /As hold him when it is his will to leap.” And she considered that every line of a poem was a lead line into the spirit world to capture a bit of memory, pieces of gold confetti, a kind of celebration. We all want to be remembered, even memory, even the way the light came in the kitchen window, when her mother turned up the dial on that cool mist color 
of a radio, when memory crossed the path of longing and took 
mother’s arm and she put down her apron said, “I don’t mind if I do,” and they danced, you watching, as you began your own cache of remembering. Already you had stored the taste of mother as milk, father as a labor of sweat and love, and night as a lonely boat of stars that took you into who you were before you slid through the hips of the story. There are no words when you cross the gate of forbidden waters, or is it a sheer scarf of the finest silk, or is it something else that causes you to forget. Nothing is ever forgotten says the god of remembering who protects the heartbeat of every little cell of knowing from the Antarctic to the soft spot at the top of this planetary baby. Oh baby, come here, let me tell you the story of the party you will never forget, no matter where you go, where you are, or where you will be when you cross the line and say, no more. No more greedy kings, no more disappointments, no more orphans, or thefts of souls or lands, no more killing for the sport of killing. No more, no more, except more of the story so I will understand exactly what I am doing here, and why, she said to the fox guardian who took her arm to help her cross the road that was given to the care of Natives who made sure the earth spirits were fed with songs, and the other things they loved to eat. They like sweets, cookies, and flowers. It was getting late and the fox guardian picked up her books as she hurried through the streets of strife. But it wasn’t getting late. There was no late, only a plate of tamales on the counter waiting to be or not to be. At this age, said the fox, we are closer to the not to be, which is the to be in the fields of sweet grasses. Wherever you are, enjoy the evening, how the sun walks the horizon before cross sing over to be, and we then exist under the realm of the moon. There’s where fears slay us, in the dark of the howling mind. We all battle. Befriend them, the moon said as a crab skittered under her skirt, her daughter in the high chair, waiting for cereal and toast. What a girl she turned out to be, a willow tree, a blessing to the winds, to her family. There she is married, and we start the story all over again, said her father in a toast to the happiness of who we are and who we are becoming as Change in a new model sedan whips it down the freeway toward the generations that follow, one after another in the original lands of the Mvskoke who are still here. Nobody goes anywhere though we are always leaving and returning. It’s a ceremony. Sunrise occurs everywhere, in lizard time, human time, or a fern uncurling time. We instinctually reach for light food, we digest it, make love, art or 
trouble of it. The sun crowns us at noon. The whole earth is a queen. Then there are always goodbyes. At sunset say goodbye to hurt, to suffering, to the pain you caused others, or yourself. Goodbye, goodbye, to Carrie Fisher, the Star Wars phenomenon, and George Michael, the singer. They were planets in our emotional universe. Some of my memories are opened by the image of love on screen in an imagined future, or broken open when the sax solo of “Careless Whisper” blows through the communal heart. Yes, there’s a cosmic consciousness. Jung named it but it was there long before named by Vedic and Mvskoke scientists. And, there is a cosmic hearteousness — for the heart is the higher mind and nothing can be forgotten there, no ever or ever. How do I sing this so 
I don’t forget? Ask the poets. Each word is a box that can be opened or closed. Then a train of words, phrases garnered by music and the need for rhythm to organize chaos. Like right here, now, in this poem is the transition phase. I remembered it while giving birth, summer sun bearing down on the city melting asphalt but there we were, my daughter and I, at the door between worlds. I was happier than ever before to welcome her, happiness was the path she chose to enter, and 
I couldn’t push yet, not yet, and then there appeared a pool of the 
bluest water. We waited there for a breath to catch up, and then it did, and she took it that girl who was beautiful beyond dolphin dreaming, and we made it, we did, to the other side of suffering. This is the story our mothers tell but we couldn’t hear it in our ears stuffed with Barbie advertising, with our mothers’ own loathing set in place by patriarchal scripture, the smothering rules to stop insurrection by domesticated slaves, or wives. It hurt everybody. The fathers cannot know what they are feeling in such a spiritual backwash. Worship boxes set into place by the need for money and power will not beget freedom. Only warships. For freedom, freedom, oh freedom sang the slaves, the oar rhythm of the blues lifting up the spirits of peoples whose bodies were worn out, or destroyed by a man’s slash, hit of greed. This is our memory too, said America. Heredity is a field of blood, celebration, and forgetfulness. Don’t take on more than you can carry, said the eagle to his twin sons, fighting each other in the sky over a fox, dangling between them. It’s that time of the year, when we eat tamales and latkes. We light candles, fires to make the way for a newborn child, for fresh 
understanding. Demons will try to make houses out of jealousy, anger, 
pride, greed, or more destructive material. They place them in a part of the body that will hold them: liver, heart, knee, or brain. So, my friend, let’s let that go, for joy, for chocolates made of ashes, mangos, grapefruit, or chili from Oaxaca, for sparkling wine from Spain, for these children who show up in our dreams and want to live at any cost because we are here to feed them joy. Your soul is so finely woven the silkworms went on strike, said the mulberry tree. We all have mulberry trees in the memory yard. They hold the place for skinned knees earned by small braveries, cousins you love who are gone, a father cutting a watermelon in the summer on the porch, and a mother so in love that her heart breaks — it will never be the same, yet all memory bends to fit. The heart has uncountable rooms. We turn to leave here, and so will the hedgehog who makes a home next to that porch. We become birds, poems.

We were running out of breath, as we ran out to meet ourselves. We were surfacing the edge of our ancestors’ fights, and ready to strike. It was difficult to lose days in the Indian bar if you were straight. Easy if you played pool and drank to remember to forget. We made plans to be professional — and did. And some of us could sing so we drummed a fire-lit pathway up to those starry stars. Sin was invented by the Christians, as was the Devil, we sang. We were the heathens, but needed to be saved from them — thin chance. We knew we were all related in this story, a little gin will clarify the dark and make us all feel like dancing. We had something to do with the origins of blues and jazz I argued with a Pueblo as I filled the jukebox with dimes in June, forty years later and we still want justice. We are still America. We know the rumors of our demise. We spit them out. They die soon.

for Lurline McGregor Ah, ah cries the crow arching toward the heavy sky over the marina. Lands on the crown of the palm tree. Ah, ah slaps the urgent cove of ocean swimming through the slips. We carry canoes to the edge of the salt. Ah, ah groans the crew with the weight, the winds cutting skin. We claim our seats. Pelicans perch in the draft for fish. Ah, ah beats our lungs and we are racing into the waves. Though there are worlds below us and above us, we are straight ahead. Ah, ah tattoos the engines of your plane against the sky—away from these waters. Each paddle stroke follows the curve from reach to loss. Ah, ah calls the sun from a fishing boat with a pale, yellow sail. We fly by on our return, over the net of eternity thrown out for stars. Ah, ah scrapes the hull of my soul. Ah, ah.