Native American Songs and Poems (4 page)

Joy Harjo [MUSCOGEE]

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
Steadily 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.

Lance Henson [CHEYENNE]

Linda Hogan [CHICKASAW]

After the words that called legs, hands,
the body
of man out of clay and sleep,
after the forgotten voyages of his own dreaming,
the forgotten clay of his beginnings,
after nakedness and fear of something larger,
these he named; wolf, bear, other
as if they had not been there
before his words, had not
had other tongues and powers
or sung themselves into life
before him.

 

These he sent crawling into wilderness
he could not enter,
swimming into untamed water.
He could hear their voices at night
and tracks and breathing
at the fierce edge of forest
where all things know the names for themselves
and no man speaks them
or takes away their tongue.

 

His children would call us pigs.
I am a pig,
the child of pigs,
wild in this land
of their leavings,
drinking from water that burns
at the edge of a savage country
of law and order.
I am naked, I am old
before the speaking,
before any Adam's forgotten dream,
and there are no edges to the names,
no beginning, no end.
From somewhere I can't speak or tell,
my stolen powers
hold out their hands
and sing me through.

Linda Hogan

This is the female corn.
This is the male.
These are the wild skirts flying
and here is the sweet dark daughter
that passed between those
who were currents of each other's love.
She sleeps
in milky sweetness. She is the stranger
that comes from a remote land, another time
where sky and earth are lovers always
for the first time each day,
where crops begin to stand
amid brown dry husks, to rise straight
and certain as old people with yellowed hair
who carry medicines,
the corn song,
the hot barefoot dance
that burns your feet
but you can't stop
trading gifts
with the land,
putting your love in the ground
so that after the long sleep of seeds
all things will grow
and the plants who climb into this world
will find it green and alive.

Rex Lee Jim [NAVAJO]

suddenly
three persons come upon an old man
hoeing with a digging stick
in the middle of the wide cornfield.
quickly
he asks, who are you?
promptly
one of the three persons answers, I am me, who else?
the old man
slowly, but surely lifts his strawhat,
wipes the sweat off his forehead
on the back of his left hand.
and he looks at the young bilagaana man
with his wife behind him who is swollen with a child.
the old man's answer comes bursting forth
through the bulging stomach, and the woman feels
each kicking foot stretching her pain.
you say you are you, but I say, you are not here yet.
although you stand before me, I only see
your father your mother your grandmother your grandfather.
the sun catches the Navajo grin in action.
see that stomach, the old man teases,
“that one is mine.”
I don't translate that, and he continues,
you are still there, there in the stomach.
I won't see you for a long time.
he looks up at the sun and then
his eyes scan his wide cornfield.
I am there, dancing in the breeze.
and just then cornstalks whistle in the breeze.
and out of the dancing stalks rides a young Navajo man,
riding a buckskin, wrangler jeans polishing
an already hard worn saddle,
a silver buckle flashing in the sun, with its
oval turquoise imitating the sky.
he strides off the horse and says,
I brought lunch for you, my father.
and the old man bellows with joy and delves into his food.

Maurice Kenny [MOHAWK]

Adrian C. Louis [PAIUTE]

Born of trees
whose timeless atoms
carried on their savage
act of indolence
in annual assault of leaves
upon the earth
while their branches
felt up the sky
where the white man's God lives,
this paper
holding these petroglyphs
is neither apology nor legacy
but a wanted poster.

 

Now, dauntless before Dante's
nocturnal emissions
of visions of Hell
I curse God and weep
because some creeps crept
through the back window and carried
away my typewriter
while we were at the wake.
When I find them,
they will bleed broken English
from shattered mouths
and my fists
will sing songs of forgiveness,
unless of course
they're my in-laws.

Duane Niatum [S‘KLALLAM]

On the bank of this Klallam river, I am
at rest and fall to earth the way
birch leaves grow small and thin in music.
Like coast wind echoes from the sea,
faces of autumn emerge in orange
and gold and mauve. Crickets spring
moss-lined goodbyes on path,
sandbar and raccoon tracks.
Bear grass trampled down all summer
outshines the illegible animal ancestors
passing through the contrary mirrors of stars

 

Yellow tulips claim there is no other world
than this hill which is as active
as the memory of a lavender field
in another country of the imagination's,
especially the one I saw in the eye
of a snail, rainbow's daughter. The cold
dampness of twigs and cones frames
the creatures of metamorphosis,
not the song higher than the osprey gliding
from one current to another above the river.
Desire rises and falls in the air
like the swallows chasing insects into fireweed,
reverses direction and zips through
the canyon, home to seed and wing.

 

The moon in a violet fancy dance,
vagabond in any season, any mood and light,
flings souvenirs to the dream catchers
running for the river, swings a cape
over shoulders as she goes to sleep
in the monolithic hollows of the sea.
The white horses of this beauty
take a step or two or three,
become the river's hoof beats of the mountain;
from the ruby-throated sky a sparrow
drops from branch to branch
into the heart-line of larch.

Duane Niatum

Memory hasn't a chord of what the family lost.
For centuries village ancestors potlatched salmon's
return so we could dance on the water like bugs.

 

Today the stones quit asking not to betray
their ceremonies, our ears deaf to their winter
story of mountain, river, cormorant, red-flowering

 

currant. Our car tracks trample their children
who vanish down the street like moonlight
into gutters, our abbreviated hours.

 

Topaz stones brought us dream circles in order
to never forget where the earth's heart cracked,
our shadows became ant fodder; we laughed

 

like flies and drank the blood from mirrors.
Flint raised his arm to the hummingbird's
fragrances, healing our eyes, spiky as sea urchins.

 

We ground Flint to a machine that exploded
with roadkill floating in toxins.
From a cave, ancestor stones gave us the cells

 

of trout, madrona, butterfly, eagle and grizzly,
gave us our birth song born of the sea,
gave us eagle feathers for the sunrise dance.

 

We chose instead to shoot the spotted-owl
from its borderless clarity,
turn off life like a video, including ours.

Simon J. Ortiz [ACOMA PUEBLO]

For all we know, we could be
already crystal motes, shattered
by swift and quick surging light.
We would never be certain if we
had a chance at all,

only settled

a vast moment later into dim shadow,
gradually blending into the prairie,
the low hills, the horizon ours now.

 

The moment before always too late.

Carter Revard [OSAGE]

Wonder who first slid in
to use another creature's skin
for staying warm—like bloody violation,
a heresy almost,
to crawl inside the deer's
still-vivid presence there,
to take their lives from what had moved
within, to eat delicious life
then spread its likeness over a sleeping
and breathing self, musk-wrapped
inside the wind,
the rain,
the sleet—
to roll up in a seal-skin self beneath
a walrus heaven
on which the sleet would rap and tap,
to feel both feet
grow warm even on ice
or in the snow—they must have thought
the flame from tallow was like
such warmth from fur and hide—
it must have been some kind
of revelation when the life
came back into a freezing hand or foot
after the fur went round its bareness, even more
when human bodies coupling in
a bear's dark fur
found winter's warmth and then
its child
within the woman
came alive.

Carter Revard

For the Voelkers, who gave the feathers; for the Besses, who beaded them into the fan; and for all the Gourd Dancers.

 

I strung dazzling thrones of thunder beings
on a spiraling thread of spinning flight,
beading dawn's blood and blue of noon
to the gold and dark of day's leaving,
circling with Sun the soaring heaven
over turquoise eyes of Earth below,
her silver veins, her sable fur,
heard human relatives hunting below
calling me down, crying their need
that I bring them closer to Wakonda's ways,
¹⁹
and I turned from heaven to help them then.
When the bullet came, it caught my heart,
the hunter's hands gave earth its blood,
loosed our light beings, let us float
toward the sacred center of song in the drum,
but fixed us first firm in tree-heart
that green light-dancers gave to men's knives,
ash-heart in hiding where deer-heart had beat,
and a one-eyed serpent with silver-straight head
strung tiny rattles around white softness
in beaded harmonies of blue and red—
lightly I move now in a man's left hand,
above dancing feet follow the sun
around old songs soaring toward heaven
on human breath, and I help them rise.