An American Sunrise: Poems by Joy Harjo

Author:Joy Harjo [Harjo, Joy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Non-Fiction, Poetry, History, Native American, Race, Environment, Memoir, Social Justice, Social Movements
ISBN: 9781324003878
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2019-06-27T00:00:00+00:00

. . .

My man’s feet are the sure steps of a father

Looking after his sons, his daughters

For when he laughs he opens all the doors of our hearts

Even as he forgets to shut them when he leaves

And when he grieves for those he loves

He carves out valleys enough to hold everyone’s tears

With his feet, these feet

My man’s widely humble, ever steady, beautiful brown feet.

“I WONDER WHAT YOU ARE THINKING,”

The feathered wife asked her feathered husband—

She watches as he cleans his wings, notes how he sends his eyes over the horizon

To viridian in the flying away direction.

So many migrations stacked within sky memory.

Her body is stirring with eggs. She tucks found materials

Into their nest with her beak.

The nerves in her wingtips sense rains coming to soften the ground.

To send food to the surface of earth.

He says nothing—

As he wonders about the careless debris that humans make

Even as it yields ribbon, floss and string.

Housecats and their sporting trails are on his mind’s map.

There are too many in this neighborhood.

A ragged yellow fellow eats birds after hours of play.

He stays out of that tom’s way, and has warned his wife

The same. Though she’s more wisely wary than him.

Dogs are easy. They bark and leap and wag their tails.

They have no concerns for most flying things.

They lap up human trails for love.

And why do we keep renewing this ceremony of nests?

Each feathered generation flies away.

What does it mean, and why

the green growing green

turning red against yellow,

then gray, gray and green again?

When I need her heartbeat

In the freeze winds why is she always there

And not somewhere else?

Her lilt question has made an echo in his ears

like a string fluttering from a bush

In a delicate spring wind:

I wonder what you are thinking . . .

He doesn’t answer.

Then he does.

“Nothing.

I was thinking about the nothing of nothing at all.”

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