Joy Harjo Quotes

(What do you believe/feel/know lies at the heart of your body of work?) JH: Compassion. Joy. (2003)

Song 4. Sioux-Soldier-Sold There is the law of the Creator which Tells us: Do not take what is not yours to take. Do not take more than you can use. Respect life and the giver of life. Give back. Defend your people when there is need For defense. And when a people strips your spirit of Your body and sells your “red skins” for Bounty, then they are the ones Who have broken the law.

I have forgotten the reason, forgive me. I have forgotten my name in the language I was born to, forgive me.

There are still ancient
symbols
alive

And we go on, keep giving birth and watch
ourselves die, over and over.
And the ground spinning beneath us
goes on talking.

What a wild dilemma,
how to make it to the stars on a highway slick with fear

Those Old Ones followed me, the quiet girl with the long dark hair, The daughter of a warrior who wouldn’t give up. I wasn’t ready yet, to fling free the cross I ran and I ran through the 2 A.M. streets. It was my way of breaking free. I was anything but history. I was the wind.

Those of fire move about the earth with inspiration and purpose. They are creative, and can consume and be consumed by their desires (p25)

I need a song that will keep sky open in my mind. If I think behind me, I might break. If I think forward, I lose now.

A panther poised in the cypress tree about to jump is a
panther poised in a cypress tree about to jump.

The panther is a poem of fire green eyes and a heart charged
by four winds of four directions.

The panther hears everything in the dark: the unspoken
tears of a few hundred human years, storms that will break
what has broken his world, a bluebird swaying on a branch a
few miles away.

He hears the death song of his approaching prey:

I will always love you, sunrise.
I belong to the black cat with fire green eyes.
There, in the cypress tree near the morning star.

When she broke on Earth, the light in her was not broken. We cannot break light, nor can we destroy it.

The door to the mind should only open from the heart.
An enemy who gets in, risks the danger of becoming a friend.

Some things on this earth are unspeakable:
Genealogy of the broken — A shy wind threading leaves after a massacre,
Or the smell of coffee and no one there —

Poet Warrior gave birth to two children
And acquired more children along the way
Through association, marriage, and love.
There were more and more story bringers
In her world.
They became her fiercest teachers
Of how there is no end to love
And of how it plants itself
Deeper than earth
Or sky.

But you must have grown out of
a thousand years dreaming
just like I could never imagine you.
You must have
broke open from another sky
to here, because
now I see you as a part of the millions of
other universes that I thought could never occur
in this breathing.
And I know you as myself, traveling.
In your eyes alone are many colonies of stars
and other circling planet motion.