Quotes from Joy Harjo

began to follow all of my thoughts and was surprised how many didn't belong to me. And how many had threads to ancestors, relatives, strangers, even plants, elements, and animals.

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.

You have paid the cover charge thousands of times over with your lives and now you are afraid you can never get out.

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.

We will keep going despite dark Or a madman in a white house dream.

She had horses who were the blue air of the sky.

At sunset say goodbye to hurt, to suffering, goodbye to the pain you caused others. Good bye, bye, don't cry.

Some will not see them. But some will see the horses with their hearts of sleeping volcanoes and will be rocked awake past their bodies to see who they have become.

my father staggering in drunk, beating my mother, the shame and hate in him burning, burning. Then he'd hit my brothers. And then me whom it was said he loved most. He'd save me for last, when his anger was ashes, when the fire was hottest. And then he's hold me, 'Sugar, sugar', he's croon, the tears so thick they made a lake on the linoleum floor.

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.

To imagine the spirit of poetry is much like imagining the shape and size of the knowing. It is a kind of resurrection light; it is the tall ancestor spirit who has been with me since the beginning, or a bear or a hummingbird. It is a hundred horses running the land in a soft mist, or it is a woman undressing for her beloved in firelight. It is none of these things. It is more than everything.

And why," she asked, "Do you call yourselves America? This hemisphere is one body, one person. She is America.

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.

You cannot legislate music to lockstep nor can you legislate the spirit of the music to stop at political boundaries- -Or poetry, or art, or anything that is of value or matters in this world, and the next worlds. This is about getting to know each other

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

I was a star falling from the night sky I needed you to catch me I was a rainbow lifting from a dark cloud I needed you to see me You keep your eyes to the ground

Our knowledge is based on the origin stories of land, genealogy and ancestors. If you know the branches of the tree of relationship between tribal clans and family members, then you know who you are, said the panther to its cubs.

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

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.

Be who you are, even if it kills you. It will. Over and over again. Even as you live.

You were born of a generation that promised to help remember.

I remain very aware of my failures and often run them obsessively through my mind, which is a failure in and of itself.

I've learned there are many genealogies. Within our family is a genealogy of rage. There is also a genealogy of justice. I would show you a map, but I am still searching the roadway for casualties.

I marked myself once with a knife. I was disappearing into the adolescent sea of rage and destruction. The mark of pain assured me of my own reality. The cut could speak. It had a voice that cried out when I could not make a sound in my defense. I never made such a mark again. Instead I chose to slash art onto canvas, pencil marks onto paper, and when I could no longer carry the burden of history, I found other openings. I found stories.