Joy Harjo Quotes

So a lot of these images are kept for – they serve a certain purpose. They can open up a moment, like that crow. It gives a place of peace. That’s how we humans find meaning. We find it in metaphor. It inspires us and keeps us going.

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.

Pass this love on, he'd say.
It knows how to bend and will never break.
It's the only thing with a give and take,
The more it's used the more it makes.

That love is the bridge that will cross the river home.
He'd be standing in the dark with no one listening.
How time blows steadily through the city, the trees.
Sing to this earth, sing, he sang.

Once there were songs for everything, Songs for planting, for growing, for harvesting, For eating, getting drunk, falling asleep, For sunrise, birth, mind-break, and war. For death (those are the heaviest songs and they Have to be pried from the earth with shovels of grief). Now all we hear are falling-in-love songs and Falling apart after falling in love songs.

when you’re writing, and I think when you’re creating, too, it’s a large part of that act of writing or — whether it’s music or stories or poetry or drawing, or any of the — it’s — a large part of it is listening.

The world doesn't always happen in a linear manner. Nature is much more creative than that, especially when it comes to time and the manipulation of time and space. Europe has gifted us with inventions, books and the intricate mechanics of imposing structures on the earth, but there are other means to knowledge and the structuring of knowledge that have no context in the European mind.

Poetry is the art that is closest to music, standing between music and narrative orality (which can be speechmaking, sermon or theater). Poetry is the voice of what can’t be spoken, the mode of truth-telling when meaning needs to rise above or skim below everyday language in shapes not discernible by the ordinary mind. It trumps the rhetoric of politicians. Poetry is prophetic by nature and not bound by time. Because of these qualities poetry carries grief, heartache, ecstasy, celebration, despair, or searing truth more directly than any other literary art form. It is ceremonial in nature. Poetry is a tool for disruption and creation and is necessary for generations of humans to know who they are and who they are becoming in the wave map of history. Without poetry, we lose our way.

There are always flowers,
Love cries, or blood.

Someone is always leaving
By exile, death, or heartbreak.

The heart is a fist.
It pockets prayer or holds rage.

something echoes
all forgotten dreams

There is a field
of talking blood
that I have not been able
to reach,
not even with knives,
not yet.

I’ll be in a car or a bus or a van or whatever, looking at the houses and the windows and all the storefronts, and thinking about all the different realms, all the different story realms, and how many — every place, every window, every doorway is an opening to a life — a whole different life, a whole series of stories. And it’s multiplied hundreds and thousands of times. And some don’t overlap at all. Some are in their very private universes; other universes are more expansive.

Emerging from a story, a poem, the Earth, a time in history, or from the body of our mothers is sometimes explosive, chaotic, frightening, yet always awe-inspiring and humbling. We can use the energy to create fresh structures, or we can destroy or be destroyed. The energy can have power over us or empower us, and even what is destructive might clear the debris so that fresh life can emerge from embers or ashes.

I leave you to your ceremony of grieving
Which is also of celebration
Given when an honored humble one
Leaves behind a trail of happiness
In the dark of human tribulation.
None of us is above the other
In this story of forever.

We are story gatherers. That's what we humans do.

"Breath is our entrance into story making — it is a promise. It is a constant ritual that we all share, and it is essential in poetry."