29 Mar How to Write a Poem in a Time of War by Joy Harjo
Shrapnel and the eye
Of a house, a row of houses. There’s a rat scrambling
From light with fleshy trash in its mouth. A baby strapped
to its mother’s back, cut loose.
Soldiers crawl the city,
the river, the town, the village,
the bedroom, our kitchen. They eat everything.
Or burn it.
They kill what they cannot take. They rape. What they cannot kill
they take.
Rumors fall like rain.
Like bombs.
Like mother and father tears
swallowed for restless peace.
Like sunset slanting toward a moonless midnight.
Like a train blown free of its destination. Like a seed
fallen where
there is no chance of trees or anyplace for birds to live.
No, start here. Deer peer from the edge of the woods.
We used to see woodpeckers
The size of the sun, and were greeted
by chickadees with their good morning songs.
We’d started to cook outside, slippery with dew and laughter,
ah those smoky sweet sunrises.
We tried to pretend war wasn’t going to happen.
Though they began building their houses all around us
and demanding more.
They started teaching our children their god’s story,
A story in which we’d always be slaves.
No. Not here.
You can’t begin here.
This is memory shredded because it is impossible to hold with words,
even poetry.These memories were left here with the trees:
The torn pocket of your daughter’s hand-sewn dress,
the sash, the lace.
The baby’s delicately beaded moccasin still connected to the foot,
A young man’s note of promise to his beloved—
No! This is not the best place to begin.
Everyone was asleep, despite the distant bombs.
Terror had become the familiar stranger.
Our beloved twin girls curled up in their nightgowns,
next to their father and me.
If we begin here, none of us will make it to the end
Of the poem.
Someone has to make it out alive, sang a grandfather
to his grandson, his granddaughter,
as he blew his most powerful song into the hearts of the children.
There it would be hidden from the soldiers,
Who would take them miles, rivers, mountains
from the navel cord place of the origin story.
He knew one day, far day, the grandchildren would return,
generations later over slick highways, constructed over old trails
Through walls of laws meant to hamper or destroy, over stones
bearing libraries of the winds.
He sang us back
to our home place from which we were stolen
in these smoky green hills.
Yes, begin here.
About the Poet
photo credit Karen Kuehn
Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1951, Joy Harjo is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She is the author of eleven collections of poetry, the most recent of which are Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years (W.W. Norton, 2022) and An American Sunrise (W.W. Norton, 2019), as well as several plays and children’s books, and two memoirs, Crazy Brave: A Memoir (W.W. Norton, 2012) and Poet Warrior (W.W. Norton, 2021). Harjo is also the editor of Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry ( W.W. Norton), a volume assembled from poems she collected as poet laureate.
Harjo was appointed the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States in 2019 and served through 2022, becoming just the second poet to serve three consecutive terms. Among Harjo’s many honors and awards are Yale University’s 2023 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, a Lifetime Achievement Award from Americans for the Arts, the Ruth Lily Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets Wallace Stevens Award, a PEN USA Literary Award, the Poets & Writers Jackson Poetry Prize, two NEA fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the Poetry Society of America’s 2024 Frost Medal and the National Humanities Medal.
She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she is the first artist-in-residence at the Bob Dylan Center. This poem appears in An American Sunrise: Poems by Joy Harjo (W.W. Norton, 2019).
Related Event
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- SUNY Fredonia will welcome 23rd U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo as its Williams Distinguished Visiting Professor on Thursday, April 2. Ms. Harjo will give a talk in the Juliet J. Rosch Recital Hall at 5 p.m. and then attend a reception at the Cathy and Jesse Marion Art Gallery in Rockefeller Arts Center, where her portrait and poem are included in B.A. Van Sise’s exhibit, “Children of Grass: A Portrait of American Poetry,” that features many of the most renowned poets working today.Both events are free and open to the public. Tickets are required for the talk, and a 2-ticket limit per person has been set. They are available in person at the Fredonia Ticket Office in the Williams Center, online, and by phone at (716) 673-3501.Please note there is a $6 service fee per order for online and phone sales only, and a 2-ticket limit per order.
The Poem of the Week feature is curated by literary legacy awardee R.D. Pohl.