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.

Dusk and snow this hour 
in argument have settled 
nothing. Light persists, 
and darkness. If a star 
shines now, that shine is 
swallowed and given back 
doubled, grounded bright. 
The timid angels flailed 
by passing children lift 
in a whitening wind 
toward night. What plays 
beyond the window plays 
as water might, all parts 
making cold digress. 
Beneath iced bush and eave, 
the small banked fires of birds 
at rest lend absences 
to seeming absence. Truth 
is, nothing at all is missing. 
Wind hisses and one shadow 
sways where a window's lampglow 
has added something. The rest 
is dark and light together tolled 
against the boundary-riven 
houses. Against our lives, 
the stunning wholeness of the world.

From Intervale by Betty Adcock. Copyright © 2001 by Betty Adcock. Reproduced with permission of Louisiana State University Press. All rights reserved.

When within ourselves in autumn we feel the autumn
I become very still, a kind of singing, and try to move
like all things green, in one direction, when within ourselves
the autumn moves, thickening like honey, that light we smear
on faces and hands, then touch the far within one another,
something like autumn, and I think when those who knew
the dead, when they fall asleep, then what, then what in autumn
when I always feel I’m writing in red pencil on a piece
of paper growing in thickness the way a pumpkin does,
traveling at fantastic speed toward orange, toward rot, when
in autumn I remember that we are cold-smitten as I continue
smearing red on this precipice, this ledge of paper over which
I lean, trying to touch those I love, their bodies rusting
as I keep writing, sketching their red hands, faces lusting for green.
 

Copyright © 2017 by Mark Irwin. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 22, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.