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. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
The silence is broken: into the nature
My soul sails out,
Carrying the song of life on his brow,
To meet the flowers and birds.
When my heart returns in the solitude,
She is very sad,
Looking back on the dead passions
Lying on Love’s ruin.
I am like a leaf
Hanging over hope and despair,
Which trembles and joins
The world’s imagination and ghost.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on December 28, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
Before I watched you die, I watched the dying
falter, their hearts curled and purring in them
like kitfoxes asleep
beside their shadows, their eyes pawed out by the trouble
of their hunger. I was
humbling, Lord, like the taxidermist’s
apprentice. I said
yes, and amen, like the monk brushing
the barley from the vealcalf’s
withers, the heft of it
as it leans against his cilice.
Winter, I have watched the lost
lie down among their bodies, clarified
as the birdsong
they have hymned of.
I have heard the earth sing longer than the song.
Come, I said, come
summer, come
after: you were the bull-elk in the moonlight
of my threshold, knocking off the mosses from its antlers
before it backed away, bewildered, into foliage.
You were thin-ribbed, were hawk-
scarred, were few.
Yes, amen, before I heard you giving up
your singing, you were something stumbling hunted
to my open door; you were thinning with the milkweed
of the river. Winter, Wintering, listen: I think of you
long gone now
through the valley, scissoring
your ancient way
through the pitch pines. Not waiting, but the great elk
in the dark door. Not ravens
where they stay, awhile, in furor,
but the lost thing backing out
among the saplings, dancing off the madness
of its antlers. Not stone, not cold
stone, but fire. The wild thing, musk-blooded, at my open
door, wakening and wakening and
wakening, migrations
in the blindness of its wild eyes,
saying Look at them, look at how they have to.
Do something with the wildness that confounds you.
Copyright © 2017 by Joseph Fasano. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 26, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.