#PoetryBreak: Remember

Coming Undone (M.A. Reilly)

Remember

  - by Joy Harjo 

Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star's stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun's birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother's, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe.
Remember you are all people and all people
are you.
Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.

"Remember." Copyright ©1983 by Joy Harjo from She Had Some Horses by Joy Harjo. 

Poetry Break: By The Way

from my journal (M.A. Reilly)

By the Way

for Adrienne Rich

By Joy Harjo

I’ve given it time, as if time were mine to give.

There was a dam, larger than Hoover or the President or the patent

For the metal creature that sucks up all the dust.

Words had to stop and ask permission before crossing over.

Oh, sometimes they were wild with the urgency of sweet

And leaped—Mostly the rest were kept in the net

Of swallowed or forbidden language.

I want to go back and rewrite all the letters.

I lied frequently.

No. I was not O.K.

And neither was James Baldwin, though his essays

Were perfect spinning platters of comprehension of the fight

To assert humanness in a black-and-white world.

That’s how blues emerged, by the way—Our spirits needed a way to dance through the heavy mess.

The music, a sack that carries the bones of those left alongside

The trail of tears when we were forced

To leave everything we knew by the way—

I constructed an individual life in the so-called civilized world.

We all did—far from the trees and plants

Who had born us and fed us.

All I wanted was the music, I would tell you now—

Within it, what we cannot carry.

I talk about then from a hotel room just miles

From your home in the East

Before you fled on your personal path of tears

To the West, that worn-out American Dream

Dogging your steps.

You lived on a pedestal for me then, the driven diver who climbed

Back up from the abyss, Venus on a seashell with a dagger

In her hands.

I had to look, and followed your tracks in the poems

Cut by suffering.

Aren’t they all?

We’re in the apocalyptic age of addiction and forgetting.

It’s worse now.

But that dam, I had to tell you. I broke it open stone by stone.

It took a saxophone, flowers, and your words

Had something to do with it

I can’t say exactly how.

The trajectory wasn’t clean, even though it was sure.

Does that make sense?

Maybe it does only in the precincts of dreams and poetry,

Not in a country lit twenty-four hours a day to keep dreams stuck

Turning in a wheel

In the houses of money.

I read about transcendence, how the light

Came in through the window of a nearby traveller

And every cell of creation opened its mouth

To drink grace.

-->

That’s what I never told you.

Fishing

No Simulacrum (M.A. Reilly. Ringwood, NJ. 2008)

Fishing

by Joy Harjo

This is the longest day of the year, on the Illinois River or a similar river in the same place. Cicadas are part of the song as they praise their invisible ancestors while fish blinking back the relentless sun in Oklahoma circle in the muggy river of life. They dare the fisher to come and get them. Fish too anticipate the game of fishing. Their ancestors perfected the moves, sent down stories that appear as electrical impulse when sunlight hits water. The hook carries great symbology in the coming of age, and is crucial to the making of warriors. The greatest warriors are those who dangle a human for hours on a string, break sacred water for the profanity of air then snap fiercely back into pearly molecules that describe fishness. They smell me as I walk the banks with fishing pole, nightcrawlers and a promise I made to that old friend Louis to fish with him this summer. This is the only place I can keep that promise, inside a poem as familiar to him as the banks of his favorite fishing place. I try not to let the fish see me see them as they look for his tracks on the soft earth made of fossils and ashes. I hear the burble of fish talk: When is that old Creek coming back? He was the one we loved to tease most, we liked his songs and once in awhile he gave us a good run. Last night I dreamed I tried to die, I was going to look for Louis. It was rather comical. I worked hard to muster my last breath, then lay down in the summer, along the banks of the last mythic river, my pole and tackle box next to me. What I thought was my last breath floated off as a cloud making an umbrella of grief over my relatives. How embarrassing when the next breath came, and then the next. I reeled in one after another, as if I'd caught a bucket of suckers instead of bass. I guess it wasn't my time, I explained, and went fishing anyway as a liar and I know most fishers to be liars most of the time. Even Louis when it came to fishing, or even dying. The leap between the sacred and profane is as thin as a fishing line, and is part of the mystery on this river of life, as is the way out. People continue to make warriors in the strangest of times. I save this part of the poem for the fish camp next to the oldest spirits whose dogs bark to greet visitors. It's near Louis's favorite spot where the wisest and fattest fish laze. I'll meet him there.

Joy Harjo, "Fishing," from The Woman Who Fell From the Sky by Joy Horjo. Copyright © 1994 by Joy Harjo. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

A Poem to Get Rid of Fear

House by the Tracks (M.A. Reilly, 2008)