—to be opened, shivering and wet with love.
Joy Harjo, from “Four Songs,” from A Map to the Next World
820 notes
·
View notes
Joy Harjo, Perhaps the World Ends Here
24K notes
·
View notes
There is an ache that begins
in the sound of an old blues song.
It becomes a house where all the lights have gone out
but one.
And it burns and burns
until there is only the blue smoke of dawn
and everyone is sleeping in someone's arms
even the flowers
even the sound of a thousand silences.
And the arms of night
in the arms of day.
Everyone except me.
Joy Harjo, In Mad Love and War; “Summer Night”
711 notes
·
View notes
Joy Harjo “Perhaps the World Ends Here”
5K notes
·
View notes
It's world poetry day so here are some of my favorite poems:
Failing and Flying by Jack Gilbert
What the Living Do by Marie Howe
Night Walk by Franz Wright
Crossword by Lloyd Schwartz
The Great Fires by Jack Gilbert
Love Train by Tomás Q. Morín
Divorced Fathers and Pizza Crusts by Mark Halliday
Perhaps the World Ends Here by Joy Harjo
in another string of the multiverse, perhaps by Michaella Batten
acknowledgments by Danez Smith
Death Wish by Josh Alex Baker
San Francisco by Richard Brautigan
How to Watch Your Brother Die by Michael Lassell
You Are the Penultimate Love of My Life by Rebecca Hazelton
On Political(ized) Life by Kanika Lawton
All the Dead Boys Look Like Me by Christopher Soto
It Was the Animals by Natalie Diaz
In Time by W.S. Merwin
It Is Maybe Time to Admit That Michael Jordan Definitely Pushed Off by Hanif Abdurraqib
Dear Life by Maya C. Popa
I Could Touch It by Ellen Bass
To The Young Who Want To Die by Gwendolyn Brooks
Accident Report in the Tall, Tall Weeds by Ada Limón
3K notes
·
View notes
974 notes
·
View notes
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 children.
You are not my blood anymore.
— Joy Harjo, from "I Give You Back," Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light
1K notes
·
View notes
Poetry is not a career — it is a state of being. You become poetry or are in a state of becoming with poetry. My chronological map of becoming would not be linear, rather it has been crisscrossed with arcs of events, poems, poets, arts, music, all bound and directed by history and memory.
Joy Harjo, from "The Craft of Writing: Joy Harjo on listening and writing with intention"
481 notes
·
View notes
Ah-Ah
by Joy Harjo
Ah, ah cries the crow arching toward the heavy sky over the marina.
Lands on the crown of the palm tree.
Ah, ah slaps the urgent cove of ocean swimming through the slips.
We carry canoes to the edge of the salt.
Ah, ah groans the crew with the weight, the winds cutting skin.
We claim our seats. Pelicans perch in the draft for fish.
Ah, ah beats our lungs and we are racing into the waves.
Though there are worlds below us and above us, we are straight ahead.
Ah, ah tattoos the engines of your plane against the sky — away from these waters.
Each paddle stroke follows the curve from reach to loss.
Ah, ah calls the sun from a fishing boat with a pale, yellow sail. We fly by
on our return, over the net of eternity thrown out for stars.
Ah, ah scrapes the hull of my soul. Ah, ah.
151 notes
·
View notes
The sorta literal translation from the arabic is so much more beautiful ::
“From here rose the first written letter, (finding its way) to every point on earth”
* * * *
“When I began to listen to poetry, it’s when I began to listen to the stones, and I began to listen to what the clouds had to say, and I began to listen to other. And I think, most importantly for all of us, then you begin to learn to listen to the soul, the soul of yourself in here, which is also the soul of everyone else.”
— Joy Harjo (via mythologyofblue)
563 notes
·
View notes
The heart has uncountable rooms.
Joy Harjo, from the poem, “Becoming Seventy
200 notes
·
View notes
on love, food, and the world ending
joy harjo perhaps the world ends here \\ @ryebreadgf
kofi
2K notes
·
View notes