Joy Harjo

There are strangers above me, below me, and all around me and
we are all strange in this place of recent invention.

I’d rather understand how to sing from a crow
who was never good at singing or much of anything
but finding gold in the trash of humans.

So what are we doing here I ask the crow parading on the ledge of
falling that hangs over this precarious city?

Crow just laughs and says wait, wait and see and I am waiting
and not seeing anything, not just yet.

But like crow I collect the shine of anything beautiful I can find.

There is no poetry where there are no mistakes, said the next messenger. I
am a human being, I said.

Always my art took place in private places, in the dark, far from public view. Even then, it was what I wanted to do with my life, “to be an artist,” I always answered.

Here is where poetry showed up, at this intersection of a glimmer of self-knowledge and the need to make art of whatever materials are at hand

myth as an archetypal reality, not as falsehood

his poetry taught me that becoming human was the most honorable task of poetry

Half of her soul was enmeshed in the internal battle of what am I in this place of loss and heartbreak? How do I bear the weight of my soul?

in a land that had been taken from us—a land no one could own.

Or now that the world is neither flat nor round but in the shape of a spiral, the shape of the mind of God.