Joy Harjo Quotes

There is no poetry where there are no mistakes.

I've always had a theory that some of us are born with nerve endings longer than our bodies

I know I walk in and out of several worlds each day.

I release you, my beautiful and terrible fear. I release you. You were my beloved and hate twin, but now, I don't know you as myself

It's possible to understand the world from studying a leaf. You can comprehend the laws of aerodynamics, mathematics, poetry and biology through the complex beauty of such a perfect structure. It's also possible to travel the whole globe and learn nothing.

I was born with eyes that can never close...

A story matrix connects all of us. There are rules, processes, and circles of responsibility in this world. And the story begins exactly where it is supposed to begin. We cannot skip any part.

All acts of kindness are lights in the war for justice.

She exists in me now, just as I will and already do within my grandchildren. No one ever truly dies. The desires of our hearts make a path. We create legacy with our thoughts and dreams.

I could hear my abandoned dreams making a racket in my soul.

Be who you are, even if it kills you. It will. Over and over again. Even as you live. Break my heart, why don't you?

I can hear the sizzle of newborn stars, and know anything of meaning, of the fierce magic emerging here. I am witness to flexible eternity, the evolving past, and I know we will live forever, as dust or breath in the face of stars, in the shifting pattern of winds.

My generation is now the door to memory. That is why I am remembering.

True power does not amass through the pain and suffering of others.

Bless the poets, the workers for justice, the dancers of ceremony, the singers of heartache, the visionaries, all makers and carriers of fresh meaning—We will all make it through, despite politics and wars, despite failures and misunderstandings. There is only love.

Someone accompanies every soul from the other side when it enters this place. Usually it is an ancestor with whom that child shares traits and gifts

To pray you open your whole self To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon To one whole voice that is you And know there is more That you can't see, can't hear Can't know except in moments Steadly growing, and in languages That aren't always sound but other Circles of motion. Like eagle that Sunday morning Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky In wind, swept our hearts clean With sacred wings. We see you, see ourselves and know That we must take the utmost care And kindness in all things. Breathe in, knowing we are made of All this, and breathe, knowing We are truly blessed because we Were born, and die soon within a True circle of motion, Like eagle rounding out the morning Inside us. We pray that it will be done In beauty. In beauty.

I sit up in the dark drenched in longing. / I am carrying over a thousand names for blue that I didn’t have at dusk.

Because Music is a language that lives in the spiritual realms, we can hear it, we can notate it and create it, but we cannot hold it in our hands

I listen to the gunfire we cannot hear, and begin this journey with the light of knowing the root of my own furious love.

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

I am a star falling from the night sky I need you to catch me I am a rainbow lifting from a dark cloud I need you to see me

Those of fire move about the earth with inspiration and purpose. They are creative, and can consume and be consumed by their desires [...] My father-to-be was of the water and could not find a hold in the banks of earthiness. Water people can easily get lost.

In Isleta the rainbow was a crack in the universe. We saw the barest of all life that is possible. Bright horses rolled over and over the dusking sky.

My father told me that some voices are so true they can be used as weapons, can maneuver the weather, change time. He said that a voice that powerful can walk away from the singer if it is shamed. After my father left us, I learned that some voices can deceive you. There is a top layer and there is a bottom, and they don't match.

You’re coming with me, poor thing. You don’t know how to listen. You don’t know how to speak. You don’t know how to sing. I will teach you.” I followed poetry.

A family is essentially a field of stories, each intricately connected. Death does not sever the connection; rather, the story expands as it continues unwinding inter-dimensionally

Remember you are this universe and this universe is you.

We are all here to serve each other. At some point we have to understand that we do not need to carry a story that is unbearable. We can observe the story, which is mental; feel the story, which is physical; let the story go, which is emotional; then forgive the story, which is spiritual, after which we use the materials of it to build a house of knowledge.

When Sun leaves at dusk, it makes a doorway. We have access to ancestors, to eternity. Breathe out. Ask for forgiveness. Let all hurts and failures go. Let them go.

Though we have instructions and a map buried in our hearts when we enter this world, nothing quite prepares us for the abrupt shift to the breathing realm.

I came into poetry feeling as though, on some level, these words were not just mine but my grandparents’, their parents’.

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.

I never got to wash my mother's body when she died. I return to take care of her in memory. That's how I make peace when things are left undone.

We become lost, Unsteady. Take a deep breath, Pray. You will not always be lost. You are right here, In your time, In your place.

In a way, we [poets] are listeners. I go to poetry because I don’t have the words.” —

I thought my dance alone through worlds of odd and eccentric planets that no one else knew would sustain me.

and this ache this trembling ache haunts me endlessly like you.

Alive. This music rocks me. I drive the interstate, watch faces come and go on either side. I am free to be sung to; I am free to sing. This woman can cross any line.

I walk in and out of several worlds every day.

In the end, we must each tend to our own gulfs of sadness, though others can assist us with kindness, food, good words, and music. Our human tendency is to fill these holes with distractions like shopping and fast romance, or with drugs and alcohol.

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.

Don't forget: hold somebody's hand through the dark.

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.

No. I was not okay. And neither was James Baldwin though his essays Were perfect spinning platters of comprehension of the fight To assert humanness in a black and white world.

Let's not shame our eyes for seeing. Instead, thank them for their bravery.

I have a cat, a stripedy cat with tickling whiskers and green electric eyes. She has the softest fur in the world. When I pet her she purrs as if she has a drum near her heart.

I can't do anything but talk to the wind, to the moon but cry out goddamn goddamn to stones and to other deathless voices that I hope will carry us all through.

It hasn't always been this way, because glaciers who are ice ghosts create oceans, carve earth and shape this city here, by the sound. They swim backwards in time.

I release you, fear, because you hold these scenes in front of me and I was born with eyes that can never close.

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.

Someone accompanies every soul from the other side when it enters this place. Usually it is an ancestor with whom that child shares traits and gifts.

I wanted to see everything. It was around the time I acquired language, or even before that time, when something happened that changed my relationship to the spin of the world. My concept of language, of what was possible with music was changed by this revelatory moment. It changed even the way I look at the sun.

The traditional ways and rituals of all of Earth's peoples are kept in containers of poetry, song, and story. It is how we know who we are, where we are coming from and who we are becoming.

All for that welcome home dance, The most favorite of all-- when everyone finds their way back together to dance, eat and celebrate. And tell story after story of how they fought and played in the story wheel and how no one was ever really lost at all.

Home is elusive. It shapeshifts with the currents of my heart and its will. Home is a trickster changing according to the medicine of the season and its lesson." -Prodigal Daughters (Kimberly Wesnaut)

We were never perfect. Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth who was once a star and made the same mistakes as humans. We might make them again, she said. Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end. You must make your own map.

Cut the ties you have to failure and shame. Let go the pain you are holding in your mind, your shoulders, your heart, all the way to your feet. Let go the pain of your ancestors to make way for those who are heading in our direction. Ask for forgiveness. Call upon the help of those who love you. These helpers take many forms: animal, element, bird, angel, saint, stone, or ancestor.

I understood why women went back to their abusers. The monster wasn't your real husband, he was a bad dream - an alien of sorts - who took over the spirit of your beloved one. He entered and left your husband. It was your real love you welcomed back in.

The most powerful poetry is birthed through cracks in history, through what is broken and unseen.

Eventually, we all make it home, and we each make an individual path by any means.

Let the earth stabilize your postcolonial insecure jitters.

To the destroyers, Earth is not a person. They will want more until there is no more to steal.

History will always find you, and wrap you In its thousand arms.

What shall I do with all this heartache?

Be respectful of the small insects, birds and animal people who accompany you. Ask their forgiveness for the harm we humans have brought down upon them.

Nobody goes anywhere though we are always leaving and returning. It's a ceremony. Sunrise occurs everywhere, in lizard time, human time, or a fern uncurling time.

Maybe it is the thunders who breathed life into my body. They are forever wanting to lift me high and carry me away." -Prodigal Daughters (Kimberly Wesnaut)

All cultures and peoples turn to poetry during times of celebration, transformation and challenge—those times when ordinary language cannot carry meaning beyond our understanding.

But come here, fear I am alive and you are so afraid of dying

And, Wind, I am still crazy. I know there is something larger than the memory of a dispossessed people. We have seen it.

But what captured him was a light in the river folding open and open blood, heart and stones shimmering like the Milky Way.

Oh, you have choked me, but I gave you the leash. You have gutted me but I gave you the knife. You have devoured me, but I laid myself across the fire.

Call your spirit back. It may be caught in corners and creases of shame, judgment, and human abuse. You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return. Speak to it as you would to a beloved child. Welcome your spirit back from its wandering. It may return in pieces, in tatters. Gather them together. They will be happy to be found after being lost for so long. Your spirit will need to sleep awhile after it is bathed and given clean clothes. Now you can have a party. Invite everyone you know who loves and supports you. Keep room for those who have no place else to go. Make a giveaway, and remember, keep the speeches short. Then, you must do this: help the next person find their way through the dark.

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.

Poetry keeps the door open to awe and ensures that we will find our way through the broken heart field of wars, losses and betrayals to understanding, compassion and gathering together.

She exists in me now, just as I will and already do within my grandchildren. No one ever truly dies. The desires of our hearts make a path. We create legacy with our thoughts and dreams. This legacy either will give those who follow us joy on their road or will give them sorrow.

The Poem I Just Wrote The poem I just wrote is not real. And neither is the black horse who is grazing on my belly. And neither are the ghosts of old lovers who smile at me from the jukebox.

How do I say it? In this language there are no words for how the real world collapses. I could say it in my own and the sacred mounds would come into focus, but I couldn't take it in this dingy envelope. So I look at the stars in this strange city, frozen to the back of the sky, the only promises that ever make sense.

My heart is taken by you and these mornings since I am a horse running towards a cracked sky where there are countless dawns breaking simultaneously. There are two moons on the horizon and for you I have broken loose.

All those you thought you lost now circle you And you are free of pain and heartbreak. Don't look back, keep going. We will carry your memory here, until we join you In just a little while, in one blink of star time.

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.

My path is made of poetry and music, characterized by rowdiness and sunflowers, and given life by everyone I have met along the way in this process of becoming human. (When I say "everyone," I don't mean just us ornery two-legged beings.)

I grow tired of the heartache Of every small and large war Passed from generation To generation. But it is not in me to give up. I was taught to give honor to the house of the warriors Which cannot exist without the house of the peacemakers.

Call your spirit back. It may be caught in corners and creases of shame, judgment, and human abuse. You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return. Speak to it as you would to a beloved child. Welcome your spirit back from its wandering. It may return in pieces, in tatters. Gather them together. They will be happy to be found after being lost for so long.

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.

In my community, we are taught that leadership qualities include humility, compassion, a sense of fairness, the ability to listen, preparation and carry-through, a love for the people, and a strong spiritual center that begins with a connection to Earth.

These are the ice horses, horses who entered through your head, and then your heart, your beaten heart. These are the ones who loved you. They are the horses who have held you so close that you have become a part of them, an ice horse galloping into fire.

Do not feed the monsters. Some are wandering thought forms, looking for a place to set up house. Some are sent to you deliberately. They come from arrows of gossip, jealousy or envy--and inadvertently from thoughtlessness. They feed on your attention, and feast on your fear.

Moonlight I know when the sun is in China because the night shining other-light crawls into my bed. She is moon. Her eyes slit and yellow she is the last one out of a dingy bar in Albuquerque— Fourth Street, or from similar avenues in Hong Kong. Where someone else has also awakened, the night thrown back and asked, 'where is the moon, my lover'? And from here I always answer in my dreaming, 'the last time I saw her was in the arms of another sky'.

Leslie Marmon Silko whispers the story is long. No, longer. Longer than that even. Longer than anything. With Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath drink at the bar. Laugh the dark laughter in the dark light. Sing a dark drunken song of men. Make a slurry toast. Rock back and forth, and drink the dark, and bask in the wallow of women knowing what women know. Just for a night. When you need to feel the ground of your life and the heart of the world, there will be a bonfire at the edge of a canyon under a night sky where Joy Harjo will sing your bonesong. Go ahead-with Anne Carson - rebuild the wreckage of a life a word at a time, ignoring grammar and the forms that keep culture humming. Make word war and have it out and settle it, scattering old meanings like hacked to pieces paper doll confetti. The lines that are left … they are awake and growling. With Virginia Woolf there will perhaps be a long walk in a garden or along a shore, perhaps a walk that will last all day. She will put her arm in yours and gaze out. At your backs will be history. In front of you, just the ordinary day, which is of course your entire life. Like language. The small backs of words. Stretching out horizonless. I am in a midnight blue room. A writing room. With a blood red desk. A room with rituals and sanctuaries. I made it for myself. It took me years. I reach down below my desk and pull up a bottle of scotch. Balvenie. 30 year. I pour myself an amber shot. I drink. Warm lips, throat. I close my eyes. I am not Virginia Woolf. But there is a line of hers that keeps me well: Arrange whatever pieces come your way. I am not alone. Whatever else there was or is, writing is with me.

You can’t take a class if taking a class feels like it’s going to kill you. Faking it never works. If you don’t believe me, read Richard Wright. Read Charlotte Brontë. Read Joy Harjo. Read Toni Morrison. Read William Trevor. Read the entire Western canon. Or just close your eyes and remember everything you already know. Let whatever mysterious starlight that guided you this far guide you onward into whatever crazy beauty awaits. Trust that all you learned during your college years was worth learning, no matter what answer you have or do not have about what use it is. Know that all those stories, poems, plays, and novels are a part of you now and that they are bigger than you and they will always be.

Our physical living is held together by plant sacrifice. We eat, wear, and are sheltered by plants and plant material. Nearly all of our medicines are plant-derived. We need to take time with them, get to know them. It’s as one of the elders from a nearby pueblo told me once when she came to visit. She admired the two aloe vera plants who took up a large part of the living room as they basked in the sunlight filtered through the skylight. They loved her attention. ‘These are the knowledge bearers. They are the ones we need to be listening to, not your computer, your internet that is pulling you into a world that will never feed you, only make you hungrier,’ she told me. ~Joy Harjo, from Poet Warrior

WASHING MY MOTHER’S BODY I never got to wash my mother’s body when she died. I return to take care of her in memory. That’s how I make peace when things are left undone. I go back and open the door. I step in to make my ritual. To do what should have been done, what needs to be fixed so that my spirit can move on, So that the children and grandchildren are not caught in a knot Of regret they do not understand.

Vision The rainbow touched down 'somewhere in the Rio Grande,' we said. And saw the light of it from your mother's house in Isleta. How it curved down between earth and the deepest sky to give us horses of color horses that were within us all of this time but we didn't see them because we wait for the easiest vision to save us. In Isleta the rainbow was a crack in the universe. We saw the barest of all life that is possible. Bright horses rolled over and over the dusking sky. I heard the thunder of their beating hearts. Their lungs hit air and sang. All the colors of horses formed the rainbow, and formed us watching them.

I Give You Back' I release you, my beautiful and terrible fear. I release you. You were my beloved and hated twin, but now, I don't know you as myself. I release you with all the pain I would know at the death of my daughters. You are not my blood anymore. I give you back the white soldiers who burned down my home, beheaded my children, raped and sodomized my brothers and sisters. I give you back to those who stole the food from our plates when we were starving. I release you, fear, because you hold these scenes in front of me and I was born with eyes that can never close. I release you, fear, so you can no longer keep me naked and frozen in the winter, or smothered under blankets in the summer. I release you I release you I release you I release you I am not afraid to be angry. I am not afraid to rejoice. I am not afraid to be black. I am not afraid to be white. I am not afraid to be hungry. I am not afraid to be full. I am not afraid to be hated. I am not afraid to be loved, to be loved, to be loved, fear. Oh, you have choked me, but I gave you the leash. You have gutted me, but I gave you the knife. You have devoured me, but I lay myself across the fire. You held y mother down and raped her, but I gave you the heated thing. I take myself back, fear. You are not my shadow any longer. I won't hold you in my hands. You can't live in my eyes, my ears, my voice, my belly, or in my heart my heart my heart my heart But come here, fear I am alive and you are so afraid of dying.

Once I traveled far above the earth. This beloved planet we call home was covered with an elastic web of light. I watched in awe as it shimmered, stretched, dimmed, and shined, shaped by the collective effort of all life within it. Dissonance attracted more dissonance. Harmony attracted harmony. I saw revolutions, droughts, famines, and the births of new nations. The most humble kindnesses made the brightest lights. Nothing was wasted.

I would rather not speak with history but history came to me. It was dark before daybreak when the fire sparked. The men left on a hunt from the Pequot village here where I stand. The women and children left behind were set afire. I do not want to know this, but my gut knows the language of bloodshed. Over six hundred were killed, to establish a home for God’s people, crowed the Puritan leaders in their Sunday sermons. And then history was gone in a betrayal of smoke. There is still burning though we live in a democracy erected over the burial ground.

On May 28, 1830, President Andrew Jackson unlawfully signed the Indian Removal Act to force move southeastern peoples from our homelands to the West. We were rounded up with what we could carry. We were forced to leave behind houses, printing presses, stores, cattle, schools, pianos, ceremonial grounds, tribal towns, churches. We witnessed immigrants walking into our homes with their guns, Bibles, household goods and families, taking what had been ours, as we were surrounded by soldiers and driven away like livestock at gunpoint. There were many trails of tears of tribal nations all over North America of indigenous peoples who were forcibly removed from their homelands by government forces. The indigenous peoples who are making their way up from the southern hemisphere are a continuation of the Trail of Tears. May we all find the way home.

In my family Monahwee is known for his magic with horses. My Aunt Lois Harjo said he was gifted in the ability to travel on a horse. He could leave for a destination at the same time as everyone else, but arrive before anyone, a feat impossible in linear time. 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. When the explorer Magellan traveled around the world by ship, he stopped at Tierra del Fuego. The indigenous people who resided there could not see the huge flags of his ships as they docked out in the natural harbor. They had not previously imagined such structures and could not see them. Conversely, neither could European explorers see the particular meaning of indigenous realities.