photo by Paul Abdoo
Earlier this year, Joy Harjo was named the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States. She is a member of the Mvskoke Nation and belongs to Oce Vpofv (Hickory Ground). The 68-year-old is the first Native person to be named U.S. Poet Laureate.
In a recent interview with the Associated Press, Harjo wrote, “This country is in need of deep healing. We’re in a transformational moment in national history and earth history, so whichever way we move is going to absolutely define us.”
This Morning I Pray for My Enemies is from her book, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings:
And whom do I call my enemy?
An enemy must be worthy of engagement.
I turn in the direction of the sun and keep walking.
It’s the heart that asks the question, not my furious mind.
The heart is the smaller cousin of the sun.
It sees and knows everything.
It hears the gnashing even as it hears the blessing.
The door to the mind should only open from the heart.
An enemy who gets in, risks the danger of becoming a friend.
Speaking with Time Magazine about her new book, An American Sunrise, she adds: “Audiences for poetry are growing because of the turmoil in our country–political shifts, climate shifts. When there’s uncertainty, when you’re looking for meaning beyond this world–that takes people to poetry. We need something to counter the hate speech, the divisiveness, and it’s possible with poetry.”
She read “a thanksgiving poem,” Perhaps the World Ends Here, on PBS News hour in 2012:
The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.
The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.
We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.
It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.
At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.
Our dreams drink coffee with us, put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the kitchen table.
This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.
Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror, a place to celebrate the terrible victory.
We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.
At this table, we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.
Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.
Harjo won the PEN USA Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction, a Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers, among other honors. She has produced a one-woman play, Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light, released five music albums, authored nine books of poetry, including An American Sunrise and How We Became Human (“Any acts of kindness are lights in the war for justice”), and two children’s books, For A Girl Becoming and The Good Luck Cat.
In an interview with Literary Mama about her memoir, Crazy Brave, Harjo says, “We are in a dynamic story field, a field of dreaming. Move as if all things are possible.”
Curated by The Circle’s Creative Director & Editor, Lara Herscovitch (Cohort 10). To reach Lara directly: thecircle@clpnewhaven.org or Lara@LaraHerscovitch.com