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Joy Harjo’s Birds

Posted in Imagery, poetry, tagged An American Sunrise, Bill Griffin, birds, Ecopoetry, imagery, Joy Harjo, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, poetry on May 10, 2024| Leave a Comment »

[two poems from An American Sunrise]

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 the 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 the 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.”

Joy Harjo

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I wonder what this House Wren outside my kitchen door is thinking. I think I can tell what he is thinking by watching what he is doing and listening to what he is saying, but is what I’m thinking he’s thinking really what he’s thinking?

Two weeks ago he – and I do mean “he,” no question about male behavior – discovered the new wren house my daughter and her Josh gave us for Christmas. For days he perched on it and blasted us with what he calls song: three razor sharp notes followed by high decibel jumble sounding like everyone’s tripping all over each other. He would sing for a few minutes, then I’d hear him on the other side of the neighbor’s yard, then down in the woods, then back to us. Pretty soon I caught him shoving sticks into the wren-sized hole in the little hanging house, then hopping inside before jutting his head out and singing again.

House Wren males build two or more “dummy nests” to attract a mate. If the female likes what she sees, she picks him for her chicks’ daddy and picks one site; she finishes off the nest with soft before laying eggs. My personal wren spent at least a week making the circuit of his three nests. Were there no females in this end of Surry County? Did I detect his singing becoming ever more energetic? (“Frantic” and “insistent” would also be good descriptors for that revving engine of a song.) Finally I noticed two wrens hopping branch to branch in the serviceberry tree where the nesting box hangs. Yes! And they’ve stayed, so they must be a pair. (To mere humans male and female House Wrens look absolutely identical, no trace of sexual dimorphism).

And he still sings. A few times an hour instead of every few minutes. I’m thinking those first songs conveyed him thinking, “This is my big chance. c’mon C’mon C’MON!” Now he’s thinking, “OK, off to a good start, kids to raise, you other wrens listen and weep and KEEP YOUR DISTANCE!” But how do I know? Just because that power-song jumps my heartbeat 20 points doesn’t mean it’s not, for the wren himself, the most laid back Zen-song in the Avian Class. In fact, it’s probably fruitless and a little silly for me to even think I can know what he’s thinking.

But then there is this: I am grateful for the tiny eggs and I’m positive he and she are as well. Let me sing for you, little House Wren, my song of gratitude.

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Joy Harjo’s An American 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 book without sharing these two poems about birds. They knock me out. I often suspected but now I see it’s true that I share a lot of DNA with birds (well, Family Hominidae and Class Aves are all part of Phylum Vertebrata, so YES we all share plenty of genes). If you, too, want to be a bird when you grow up, send me a comment after you finish reading.

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Redbird Love

We watched her grow up.

She was the urgent chirper,

Fledgling flier.

And when spring rolled

Out its green

She’d grown

Into the most noticeable

Bird-girl.

Long-legged and just

The right amount of blush

Tipping her wings, crest

And tail, and

She knew it

In the bird parade.

We watched her strut.

She owned her stuff.

The males perked their armor, greased their wings,

And flew sky-loop missions

To show off

For her.

In the end

There was only one.

There’s that one you circle back to – for home.

This morning

The young couple scavenge seeds

On the patio.

She is thickening with eggs.

Their minds are busy with sticks the perfect size, tufts of fluff

Like dandelion, and other pieces of soft.

He steps aside for her, so she can eat.

Then we watch him fill his beak

Walk tenderly to her and kiss her with seed.

The sacred world lifts up its head

To notice –

We are double, triple blessed.

Joy Harjo

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The Way Home

Posted in family, music, Photography, poetry, tagged An American Sunrise, Bill Griffin, family, imagery, Joy Harjo, nature, nature photography, poetry on May 3, 2024| 10 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Joy Harjo]

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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The Story Wheel

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.

Joy Harjo

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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?

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.

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?

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.

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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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?

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.

There is no word in this trade language, no words with enough power to hold all this we have become –

Joy Harjo

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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.

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.

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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Beyond

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

Beyond the footpaths we walk every day

From sunrise to kitchen, to work, to garden, to play

To sunset, to dark, and back

Beyond where the baby sleeps, her breath

A light mist of happiness making

A fine rainbow of becoming knowledgeable around us.

Beyond the children learning alphabets

And numbers, bent over their sticks and dolls

As they play war and family, grow human paths

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

Beyond sunset, can you hear it?

The shaking of shells, the drumming of feet, the singers

Singing, all of us, all at once?

In the song of beyond, how deep we are –

Joy Harjo

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Small Voices

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont, GSMIT, Joy Harjo, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, poetry, Wendell Berry on November 10, 2023| 8 Comments »

[With poetry by Joy Harjo and Wendell Berry]

For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet

Put down that bag of potato chips, that white bread, that bottle of pop.

Turn off that cellphone, computer, and remote control.

Open the door, then close it behind you.

Take a breath offered by friendly winds. They travel the earth gathering essences of plants to clean.

Give it back with gratitude.

If you sing it will give your spirit lift to fly to the stars’ ears and back.

Acknowledge this earth who has cared for you since you were a dream planting itself precisely within your parents’ desire.

Let your moccasin feet take you to the encampment of the guardians who have known you before time, who will be there after time. They sit before the fire that has been there without time.

Let the earth stabilize your postcolonial insecure jitters.

Be respectful of the small insects, birds and animal people who accompany you.

Ask their forgiveness for the harm we humans have brought down upon them.

Don’t worry.

The heart knows the way though there may be high-rises, interstates, checkpoints, armed soldiers, massacres, wars, and those who will despise you because they despise themselves.

The journey might take you a few hours, a day, a year, a few years, a hundred, a thousand or even more.

Watch your mind. Without training it might run away and leave your heart for the immense human feast set by the thieves of time.

Do not hold regrets.

When you find your way to the circle, to the fire kept burning by the keepers of your soul, you will be welcomed.

You must clean yourself with cedar, sage, or other healing plant.

Cut the ties you have to failure and shame.

Let go the pain you are holding in your mind, your shoulders, your heart, all the way to your feet. Let go the pain of your ancestors to make way for those who are heading in our direction.

Ask for forgiveness.

Call upon the help of those who love you. These helpers take many forms: animal, element, bird, angel, saint, stone, or ancestor.

Call your spirit back. It may be caught in corners and creases of shame, judgment, and human abuse.

You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return.

Speak to it as you would to a beloved child.

Welcome your spirit back from its wandering. It may return in pieces, in tatters. Gather them together. They will be happy to be found after being lost for so long.

Your spirit will need to sleep awhile after it is bathed and given clean clothes.

Now you can have a party. Invite everyone you know who loves and supports you. Keep room for those who have no place else to go.

Make a giveaway, and remember, keep the speeches short.

Then, you must do this: help the next person find their way through the dark.

Joy Harjo

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[Great Smoky Mountains National Park bids Bill farewell during the last moments of the Tremont Writers’ Conference:]

Goodbye, Love. Thanks for dropping by. This is your last chance to slurp up the prompts you were thinking you might be handed while you’re here. Your last opportunity to be inspired. Which means what, exactly? Inspire, breathe in, be filled with spirit. But did you think I’d tip you up like a funnel and just pour right down? Think back to that little exercise in your application and cull one word – community. This is something I know all about, I the Queen of Connections, I the web of interactions, whether in a gram of soil beneath your feet or spanning the entire watershed of this Middle Prong that flows past you right now – community.

I’m more than willing to speak. I live to show myself to you. Take a closer look at my image in that postcard and read the fine print: International Biosphere Reserve. But did you notice how small those letters are compared to the beech and oak overtowering? The subtext is, you don’t have to be such a geek about it. Oh sure, learn my names, my histories, my ecologies, but please, for at least one moment, forget about words on paper, Human Person, and just look around you.

Right around you – seven faces peering back (eight, if you count Jeremy arriving with the coffee delivery). What have you found here, and what will you keep? It’s more than friendship, it’s more than a shared task and a common goal. It’s connection. Don’t drop it. Don’t lose it. And what I’m really saying is . . . See you later!

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More than a week has passed and I’m straining hard to hear the Middle Prong. Where has that connection flown? What was the sound of that beckoning? Have I traveled too far beyond its reach, too many highway miles, too many turnings within?

Here I am surrounded by books and papers, electronics and plastics, literally surrounded: Amelia says, “Your office is a big mess, Pappy.” Surrounded and cumbered by the “should’s” and “got to’s” that no doubt fill your world as well. First phone calls of the day: a change in tomorrow’s doctor appointments for Mom and Dad; on hold and digital assistant waiting for their financial manager; negotiating the week’s schedule. If only the tinnitus I constantly live with sounded more like wind in the pines and rushing water.

But right now a female cardinal is craning to reach the suet feeder I’ve hidden in the center of the holly outside my window. In an hour, Linda and I will take our first walk together on a new little sprig of MST I helped work on this month. I am rich in these connections and many more. I grieve for those who don’t experience community. Who walk past the little purple flower sprouted through the concrete and never see it. Who feel mostly alienation and suspicion for the human beings around them, much less the non-bipedal creatures. Who cut themselves off from the voice of wind that wants to fill them and let them breathe deep. Philosophers and poets write heavy volumes about the sickness in our human spirits when we separate ourselves from the earth. What is our reply?

Perhaps this Voice is saying, “C’mon, little Man. You know some folks who need to hear me. Spin a few connections!” See you later. See you now!

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Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,

vacation with pay. Want more

of everything ready-made. Be afraid

to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.

Not even your future will be a mystery

anymore. Your mind will be punched in a card

and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something

they will call you. When they want you

to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something

that won’t compute. Love the Lord.

Love the world. Work for nothing.

Take all that you have and be poor.

Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace

the flag. Hope to live in that free

republic for which it stands.

Give your approval to all you cannot

understand. Praise ignorance, for what man

has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.

Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.

Say that your main crop is the forest

that you did not plant,

that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested

when they have rotted into the mold.

Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus

that will build under the trees

every thousand years.

Listen to carrion — put your ear

close, and hear the faint chattering

of the songs that are to come.

Expect the end of the world. Laugh.

Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful

though you have considered all the facts.

So long as women do not go cheap

for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy

a woman satisfied to bear a child?

Will this disturb the sleep

of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.

Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head

in her lap. Swear allegiance

to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos

can predict the motions of your mind,

lose it. Leave it as a sign

to mark the false trail, the way

you didn’t go. Be like the fox

who makes more tracks than necessary,

some in the wrong direction.

Practice resurrection.

Wendell Berry

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Today’s poems were offered as direction for meditation while visiting our “secret spots” during several days at Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont. Any program at Tremont always includes space for quiet reflection while outdoors in nature, whether your secret spot is halfway up the Lumber Ridge Trail or a big smooth rock beside the Little River.

Joy Harjo (born 1951) was appointed the new United States poet laureate in 2019. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1951, Harjo is a member of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation. She is the author of several books of poetry, including An American Sunrise, (W. W. Norton, 2019), and Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (W. W. Norton, 2015). She is a current Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Wendell Berry (born 1934) is an American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer. He is an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and a recipient of The National Humanities Medal, along with many other awards and honors. On January 28, 2015, he became the first living writer to be inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.

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