Quotes from Joy Harjo

You're gone now, and I'm still in this predicament called living, Charlie. I imagine things don't change much when you cross the line. You're still you. And I'm still here at the other end of this long, long wave, listening.

I have no more land. I am driven away from home, driven up the red waters, let us all go, let us all die together and somewhere upon the banks we will be there.

Some of us did not make it. We carried their bodies far away From the cities and set their spirits free. This moment is for them—gives them nourishment Of our love to keep moving toward home.

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

I will see you again , is one of the names for blue-- A color beyond the human sky of mind-- One third up the ladder of blue is where we sit for grief--

The question that comes up when you write about trauma is, are you retraumatizing? Are you retraumatizing by writing about trauma? That's a good question. I remember the writer, poet Meridel Le Sueur, social activist in the '30, calling to tell me when I was a young woman, she said: "I wrote so beautifully about terrible things that happened. And was I wrong to do that?

I study and read poems and try to put myself in them.

Raw red cliffs that you stumbled down into your own shadow haven't kept you away, or soft red lights and strange electrical music that I play.

I am always in danger.

I remember when there was no urge to cut the land or each other into pieces, when we knew how to think in beautiful. (Lines from Harjo's poem Emergence.)

Imagine if we natives went to the cemeteries in your cities and dug up your beloved relatives, pulled off rings, watches, and clothes, and called them artifacts, then carried the bones over to the university for study so we could understand you. Consider that there are more bones of native people in universities and museums for study, than there are those of us living.

But your half-grin is the only image that comes clear. All the words lead to that

Or maybe you are my own life scheming desperately to climb back in.

The pervasive rhythm of her mother's heartbeat is a ghostly track that follows her.

When I woke up from a forty-year sleep, it was by a song. I could hear the drums in the village. I felt the sweat of ancestors in each palm. The singers were singing the world into place, even as it continued to fall apart. They were making songs to turn hatred into love.

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

By listening we will understand who we are in this holy realm of words.

You must speak in the language of justice.

You might try dancing theory with a bustle, or a jingle dress, or with turtles strapped around your legs. You might try wearing colonization like a heavy gold chain around a pimp's neck.

For the true warriors of the world, fighting is the last resort to solving a conflict. Every effort is made to avoid bloodshed

Under our ribs our hearts are bloody stars. Shine on shine on, and horses in their galloping flight strike the curve of ribs.

Praise crazy. Praise sad. Praise the path on which we're led. Praise the roads on earth and water. Praise the eater and the eaten. Praise beginnings; praise the end. Praise the song and praise the singer. Praise the rain; it brings more rain. Praise the rain; it brings more rain.

her eyes closed against some unimagined darkness, where she is buried in an ache in which nothing makes sense.

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—