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

HONORING Who sings to the plants That are grown for our plates? Are they gathered lovingly In aprons or arms? Or do they suffer the fate Of the motor-driven whip Of the monster reaper? No song at all, only The sound of money Being stacked in a bank Who stitched the seams in my clothes One line after another? Was the room sweaty and dark With no hour to spare? Did she have enough to eat? Did she have a home anywhere? Or did she live on the floor? And where were the children? Or was the seamstress the child With no home of his or her own? Who sacrifices to make clothes For strangers of another country? And why? Let’s remember to thank the grower of food The picker, the driver, The sun and the rain. Let’s remember to thank each maker of stitch And layer of pattern, The dyer of color In the immense house of beauty and pain. . . . Let’s honor the maker. Let’s honor what’s made.

She thinks of the 4 a.m. lonelinesses that have folded
her up like death, discordant, without logical and
beautiful conclusion.

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.