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[with 3 poems by Joy Harjo]
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And the blessing began a graceful moving through the grasses of time, from the beginning, to the circling around place of time, always moving, always
++++++++ from Bless This Land, Joy Harjo
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❦
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The Story Wheel
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I leave you to your ceremony of grieving
Which is also of celebration
Given when an honored humble one
Leaves behind a trail of happiness
In the dark of human tribulation.
None of us is above the other
In this story of forever.
Though we follow that red road home,
one behind another.
There is a light breaking through the storm
And it is buffalo hunting weather.
There you can see your mother.
She is bus as she was ever –
She holds up a new jingle dress, for her youngest beloved daughter.
And fo her special son, a set of finely beaded gear.
All for that welcome home dance,
The most favorite of all –
when everyone finds their way back together
to dance, eat and celebrate.
And tell story after story
of how they fought and played
in the story wheel
and how no one
was every really lost at all.
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Joy Harjo
from An American Sunrise, W. W. Norton, New York NY, © 2019
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Last night I sat silent on stage waiting as a few early arrivals took their seats in the audience. We singers had a few more selections to rehearse before filing out to prepare our official entrance, and for now we waited. Shouldn’t I have been anxious in anticipation of the harmonies we would soon raise together? Shouldn’t I have been thrilled as the strings took their places and began to tune their instruments? Shouldn’t joy live here?
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No, something dark nagged me. My heart was stone. I felt suspicious of these watchers, listeners. I was afraid of their grand and thriving church. I distrusted what they would think of me if they in turn suspected I didn’t think or believe precisely as they did. I told myself I was already rejected, on the outside. I didn’t belong here.
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Joy Harjo writes, The old Mvskoke laws outlawed the Christian religion / Because it divided the people. / . . . But Mvskoke ways are to make relatives. Where is the religion that makes relatives? People, plants, creatures, everything together as family? A religion that turns all people to face each other within the circle rather than turning them out? Linda and I had been thrashing with recent revelations that people were leaving our son’s church because one of the ministers has come out as gay. These people leaving – we thought we knew them, we considered them neighbors. We don’t understand the rejection, the turning apart. How can we understand?
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When our chorus returns to our places before a full house, I don’t recognize many faces. But I do know a few, some from years in the past, and I remember I love them. Now lift our voices together and sing of a Creator who is always with us. We sing longing and loss, humor and fullness, songs like rivers that course and meander a long journey, that carry all the weight of time and earth. I sing. And at the end of the singing we have become one family.
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The heart of stone has only hardened itself. Everything that lives wants to soften that heart. Everything that lives wants to open each heart to beauty and truth.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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from Exile of Memory
. . .
In the complex here there is a singing tree.
It sings of the history of the trees here.
It sings of Monahwee who stood with his warrior friends
On the overlook staring into the new town erected
By illegal residents.
It sings of the Civil War camp, the bloodied
The self-righteous, and the forsaken.
It sings of atomic power and the rise
Of banks whose spires mark
The worship places.
The final verse is always the trees.
They will remain.
. . .
When it is time to leave this place of return,
What will I say that I found here?
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From out of the mist, a form wrestled to come forth –
It was many legged, of many arms, and sent forth thoughts of many colors.
There were deer standing near us under the parted, misted sky
As we watched, the smelled for water
Green light entered their bodies
From all leaved things they ate –
. . .
The Mvskoke laws outlawed the Christian religion
Because it divided the people.
We who are relatives of Panther, Racoon, Deer, and the other animals and winds were soon divided.
But Mvskoke ways are to make relatives.
We made a relative of Jesus, gave him a Mvskoke name
. . .
We could not see our ancestors as we climbed up
To the edge of destruction
But from the dark we felt their soft presences at the edge of our mind
And we hear their singing.
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There is no word in this trade language, no words with enough power to hold all this we have become –
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Joy Harjo
from An American Sunrise, W. W. Norton, New York NY, © 2019
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❦ ❦ ❦
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❦ ❦ ❦
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An American Sunrise opens with a map of a trail of tears, that of the Muscogee Creek Nation’s forced displacement to Oklahoma from their native homelands near Talladega, Georgia in the 1830’s. One of many trails of tears. In Joy Harjo’s preface she includes this plea and blessing: May we all find the way home.
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Toward the close of the book, Joy Harjo describes how her Great-Grandfather Monahwee could bend time. The entire book is an experience of time and place bending, fluid, circular, all connected. We hear the voices of ancestors and offspring. We hear the voices of creatures on earth and of Earth herself. We are torn by hatred and injustice – we bleed. We smell the smoke of cook fires at dawn and feel the sun on our face – we are fed. We are challenged and re-challenged to connect ourselves to the thread of life that weaves through all people and all creation and leaves nothing out. As the poet says, Nobody goes anywhere / though we are always leaving and returning. And her experiences are, as for all of us . . . the giving away to history which in no means meant giving up. For a warrior it is not possible to give up.
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For any of us to find home, we must all find home. We must all witness cruelty and kindness in this land. From the book’s final poem, Bless This Land: Bless us, these lands, said the rememberer. These land aren’t our / lands. These lands aren’t your lands. We are this land. May the poems and the songs bring all things into our memory and show us the way.
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❦
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An American Sunrise, Joy Harjo; W. W. Norton & Company, New York NY © 2019. Joy Harjo served as Poet Laureate of the United States for three terms, 2019 through 2021.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Beyond
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Beyond sunrise, there is a song we follow
Beyond clouds traveling with rain humped
On their backs, lightning in their fists
Beyond the blue horizon where our ancestors
Appear bearing gifts, wrapped in blankets woven
With sun and strands of scarlet time
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Beyond the footpaths we walk every day
From sunrise to kitchen, to work, to garden, to play
To sunset, to dark, and back
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Beyond where the baby sleeps, her breath
A light mist of happiness making
A fine rainbow of becoming knowledgeable around us.
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Beyond the children learning alphabets
And numbers, bent over their sticks and dolls
As they play war and family, grow human paths
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Beyond the grandmothers and grand fathers
Their mothers and fathers, and in the marrow of their bones
To when that song was furs sung we traveled on
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Beyond sunset, can you hear it?
The shaking of shells, the drumming of feet, the singers
Singing, all of us, all at once?
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In the song of beyond, how deep we are –
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Joy Harjo
from An American Sunrise, W. W. Norton, New York NY, © 2019
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❦ ❦ ❦
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V E R S E and I M A G E 
Joy Harjo is a wonderful poet. Thanks for this! I’m sorry you’re dealing with un-Christian behavior in your church, Bill. That sounds be painful and frustrating.
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Thanks for diving in, Pam. It’s not “my” church that struggling at the moment (we have and no doubt will again struggle with all the difficult issues that plague any spiritual journey), but I’m connected to MANY churches. Through family members, different churches where our choral group rehearses and performs, judgement and self-righteousness from churches I’ve never even set foot in. A microcosm of the struggles of our nation and our world. We’re all stuck and long for freedom. —B
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These poems are timeless but speak to the divisiveness of our times, and plea for unity.
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Since the issue came up, our Lutheran (ELCA) church in Troutman was broken apart by a few zealots who would never abide the (non-existant) likelihood of an LGBTQ pastor. The church broke away and joined the NALC, a conservative fledgling organization. This was my wife’s belived beautiful childhood church, founded and supported by her ancestors. It was a treasured part of our lives, but, alas, no more.
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My heart is with you all, Les. —B
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Good Morning! I first found Joy Harjo in The Language of Life and consider her work with high regard… The divisiveness in our culture, the “us” vs “them” mentality, seems worse when people sense chaos in their lives. Our United Methodist Church has just made positive efforts to remove 50+ years of discriminatory language and policies from its Book of Discipline… I am hopeful that my denomination will live into its description as “United” — IMHO, there is a force that holds the universe together; we need to focus on that, peeling away layers that interfere with its attraction.
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Thank you for this, Jane. You express it perfectly, and these struggles and questions are just what so often fill our conversations here. I hold to the certainty and awareness that underlying our existence is something deeper than chemical affinities and random recombinations. God wants Life. Diversity and the filling of every niche are evidence of Spirit. And if all Life is part of God’s desire, how can we feel anything but gratitude and do anything but treasure it? —B
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[…] Sunrise is a journey, a revelation, a lament, a celebration. I featured three poems last week in THE WAY HOME and pondered what it might take for us to all become family. This week, though, I can’t leave her […]
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I was blessed to see Joy Harjo in person here in Florida. I love her rich but simple images of nature and her Cherokee roots.
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AMERICAN SUNRISE has all the pain and anger of genocide and displacement, but the more I read it the more I discover its foundation of peace and gratitude to the earth. —B
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