by Joy Harjo
“Sometimes I drink;
other times I think I’m just crazy.”
“Hey, here comes Jim. God, he’s ugly.”
“That’s okay, brother, sit down.
Chippewas are always like that.”
“Yeah, Chippewas were made to be like that.”
The words jerk through me;
they vibrate and wobble for a long time.
“If them Pueblos ever learn to work,
they’ll be okay.”
“It’s a cultural trait with them,
climb cliffs and throw rocks,
too tired to work.”
“I heard three Indian guys got stabbed
downtown outside the Winstins.
Someone was watching them from the Federal Building
from the sixth floor where the BIA is.”
Silence is sometimes the still wind;
sometimes it is the emptiness.
“I went to see my parole officer;
he said to behave or we’ll send you back to the res.”
“Man, when I was about to get out,
I heard the guard yell, ’0367 Griego,
get your red ass in gear, you’re going home,’
I couldn’t believe it; I just stood there and cried.”
“I know. I know. Here, have another drink
of culture.”
I don’t know if my feet can make it;
my soul is where it has always been;
my heart is staggering somewhere in between.
selection from From Sand Creek
Don’t fret now.
Songs are useless
to exculpate sorrow.
That’s not their intent anyway.
Strive
for significance.
Cull seeds from grass.
Develop another strain of corn.
Whisper for rain.
Don’t fret.
Warriors will keep alive in the blood.
Somehow
it was impossible
for them
to understand true safety.
Knowledge for them
was impossible
to understand as pain.
That was untrustworthy,
lost to memory.
Death was sin.
Their children
hunkered down, frightened
into quilts, listening
to wind
speaking Arapahoe words
for pain and beauty and generations.
But they refused to understand.
Instead, they protested
the northwind,
kept adding rooms.
Built fences.
Their children learned to plan.
Their parents required submission.
Warriors could have passed
into their young blood.
EMERSON BLACKHORSE MITCHELL (1945–), Diné, was born near Shiprock, New Mexico, where he still lives. He began writing poetry while he was in boarding school in the 1960s, using both Navajo and English. His autobiography, Miracle Hill: The Story of a Navajo Boy, was first published in 1967 and was reprinted in 2004 by the University of Arizona Press. He teaches at Red Mesa High School in Teec Nos Pos, Arizona, and at the Shiprock campus of Diné College.
Miracle Hill
I stand upon my miracle hill,
Wondering of the yonder distance,
Thinking, When will I reach there?
I stand upon my miracle hill.
The wind whispers in my ear.
I hear the songs of old ones.
I stand upon my miracle hill;
My loneliness I wrap around me.
It is my striped blanket.
I stand upon my miracle hill
And send out touching wishes
To the world beyond hand’s reach.
I stand upon my miracle hill.
The bluebird that flies above
Leads me to my friend, the white man.
I come again to my miracle hill.
At last I know the all of me—
Out there, beyond, and here upon my hill.
ADRIAN C. LOUIS (1946–2018), Lovelock Paiute, the oldest of twelve children, moved from Nevada to Rhode Island, earning his BFA and MFA in creative writing from Brown University. Louis published extensively in both poetry and prose, winning the Pushcart Prize and the Cohen Award as well as fellowships from the Bush Foundation, the South Dakota Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His time teaching and living in the Pine Ridge Reservation community in South Dakota heavily influenced his poetry. Electric Snakes was his last poetry collection.
Skinology
Yellow roses, wild roses,
their decades of growth,
a fierce fence between
the drunkenness
of my neighbors
& me.
I have known
some badass Skins.
Clichéd bad-to-the-bone
Indians who were maybe
not bad but just broke,
& broken for sure.
Late winter, late night,
a gentle rapping, a tapping
on my chamber door . . .
some guy selling a block
of commodity cheese
for five bucks.
You climbed a tree,
sat there for hours
until some kind of voice
called you back home.
You unfolded your wings,
took to the air & smashed
into earth. They hauled
you to ER, then Detox
where they laughed
at your broken wings.
Once, I thought
I saw eagles soar,
loop & do the crow hop
in the blue air while
the sun beat the earth
like a drum, but I was
disheveled & drinking
those years.
Indians & the Internet.
Somewhere, sometime.
Whenever a Messiah
Chief is born, jealous
relatives will drag him
down like the old days
only instantly now.
In a brutal land
within a brutal land
with corrupt leaders
& children killing themselves
we know who is to blame.
But, we are on a train,
a runaway train & we
don’t know what to do.
The good earth,
the sun blazing down,
us in our chones, butts
stuck in inner tubes,
floating down a mossy
green river, speechless,
stunned silent with joy
& sobriety & youth,
oh youth.
She smiled at me
& got off her horse.
She smelled of leather
& sweat & her kiss has
lasted me fifty years.
Bad Indians do
not go to hell.
They are marched
to the molten core
of the sun & then
beamed back to
their families,
purified, whole
& Holy as hell.
This Is the Time of Grasshoppers
and All That I See Is Dying
Colleen,
this is the time of grasshoppers
and all that I see is dying except
for my virulent love for you.
The Cowturdville Star-Times,
which usually has a typo
in every damn column,
says the grasshoppers this year
“are as big as Buicks” and
that’s not bad, but then we
get two eight-point pages
of who had dinner with whom
at the bowling alley café and
who went shopping at Target
in Rapid City and thus the high
> church of Adrian the Obscure is sacked.
Even my old Dylan tapes are fading,
becoming near-comic antiques.
The grasshoppers are destroying
our yard and they’re as big as
my middle finger saluting God.
The grass is yellow. The trees
look like Agent Orange has hit
but it’s only the jaw-work of those
drab armored insects who dance
in profusion and pure destruction.
Sweet woman, dear love of my life,
when you’re not angry and sputtering
at everything and everyone, you
become so childlike, so pure.
Your voice seems to have grown
higher recently, almost a little-girl pitch.
Today, like most days, I have you
home for your two-hour reprieve
from the nursing home prison.
We’re sitting at the picnic table in
the backyard staring at the defoliation
of lilacs, brain matter, and honeysuckle.
You’re eating a Hershey Bar and
a crystal glob of snot is hanging
from your nose.
I reach over, pinch it off,
and wipe it on my jeans.
You thrust the last bite
of chocolate into my mouth
as a demented grasshopper
jumps onto your ear.
You scream. I howl
with laughter until you do too.
Happiness comes with a price.
This is the time of grasshoppers
and all that I see is dying except
for my swarming love for you.
Last night on PBS some
lesioned guy being screwed to death
by legions of viral invisibility
blurted the great cliché of regret:
I wish I could be twenty
again and know what
I know now . . .
My own regrets are equally foolish.
And, I wonder, how the hell
is it I’ve reached a place
where I’d give what’s left
of my allotment of sunsets
and frozen dinners
for some unholy replay
of just one hour in some nearly
forgotten time and place?
Darling,
in the baked soil of the far west,
I first saw the ant lions, those
hairy little bugs who dug funnel
traps for ants in the dry earth.
At twelve, looking over the edge
of one such funnel surrounded by
a circle of tiny stones in the sand,
I aimed a beam of white light
from my magnifying glass
and found I could re-create
a hell of my own accord.
Poverty and boredom
made me cruel early on.
The next summer while digging
postholes I found a cache of
those grotesque yellow bugs
we called Children of the Earth
so I piled matches atop them
and barbecued their ugliness.
I was at war with insects.
In my fifteenth summer I got
covered with ticks in the sagebrush
and that fall I nervously lost my cherry
in a cathouse called the Green Front
and got cursed with crabs but that’s
not what I want to sing about
at all . . . come on now.
This is no bug progression.
This ain’t no insect sonata.
This is only misdirection,
a sleight of hand upon the keys
and the unholy replay of just
one hour in some nearly
forgotten time and place
that I’d like to return to
will remain myth or maybe
a holy, tumescent mystery.
And let’s not call
these bloodwords
POETRY or a winter count
of desperate dreams
when reality is much simpler.
Colleen,
I swear to Christ
this is the time of grasshoppers
and all that I see is dying except
for my sparkling love for you.
LINDA NOEL (1947–), Koyongk’awi Maidu, is a former poet laureate of Ukiah, California. Her debut collection, Where You First Saw the Eyes of Coyote, was published in 1983; since then, her work has been featured in exhibits across California such as “Sing Me Your Story, Dance Me Home: Art and Poetry from Native California” and in anthologies such as Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Native Women’s Writings of North America.
Lesson in Fire
My father built a good fire
He taught me to tend the fire
How to make it stand
So it could breathe
And how the flames create
Coals that turn into faces
Or eyes
Of fish swimming
Out of flames
Into gray
Rivers of ash
And how the eyes
And faces look out
At us
Burn up for us
To heat the air
That we breathe
And so into us
We swallow
All the shapes
Created in a well-tended fire
LESLIE MARMON SILKO (1948–), Laguna, was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and raised at Laguna Pueblo, and she graduated from the University of New Mexico. A multidimensional artist, she works in poetry, essays, fiction, painting, and film. Her literary works include Storyteller, Ceremony, Almanac of the Dead, Gardens in the Dunes, and The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir. The recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Grant and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Silko lives in Tucson, Arizona.
Where Mountain Lion Lay Down with Deer
I climb the black rock mountain
stepping from day to day
silently.
I smell the wind for my ancestors
pale blue leaves
crushed wild mountain smell.
Returning
up the gray stone cliff
where I descended
a thousand years ago.
Returning to faded black stone
where mountain lion lay down with deer.
It is better to stay up here
watching wind’s reflection
in tall yellow flowers.
The old ones who remember me are gone
the old songs are all forgotten
and the story of my birth.
How I danced in snow-frost moonlight
distant stars to the end of the Earth,
How I swam away
in freezing mountain water
narrow mossy canyon tumbling down
out of the mountain
out of deep canyon stone
down
the memory
spilling out
into the world.
Long Time Ago
Long time ago
in the beginning
there were no white people in this world
there was nothing European.
And this world might have gone on like that
except for one thing:
witchery.
This world was already complete
even without white people.
There was everything
including witchery.
Then it happened.
These witch people got together.
Some came from far far away
across oceans
across mountains.
Some had slanty eyes
others had black skin.
They all got together for a contest
the way people have baseball tournaments nowadays
/> except this was a contest
in dark things.
So anyway
they all go together
witch people from all directions
witches from all the Pueblos
and all the tribes.
They had Navajo witches there,
some from Hopi, and a few from Zuni.
They were having a witches’ conference,
that’s what it was.
Way up in the lava rock hills
north of Cañoncito
they got together
to fool around in caves
with their animal skins.
Fox, badger, bobcat, and wolf
they circled the fire
and on the fourth time
they jumped into that animal’s skin.
But this time it wasn’t enough
and one of them
maybe Sioux or some Eskimos
started showing off.
“That wasn’t anything,
watch this.”
The contest started like that.
Then some of them lifted the lids
on their big cooking pots,
calling the rest of them over
to take a look:
dead babies simmering in blood
circles of skull cut away
all the brains sucked out.
Witch medicine
to dry and grind into powder
for new victims.
Others untied skin bundles of disgusting objects:
dark flints, cinders from burning hogans where the
dead lay
Whorls of skin
cut from finger tips
sliced from the penis end and clitoris tip.
Finally there was only one
who hadn’t shown off charms or powers.
The witch stood in the shadows beyond the fire
and no one ever knew where this witch came from
which tribe
or if it was a woman or a man.
But the important thing was
this witch didn’t show off any dark thunder charcoals
or red ant-hill beads.
This one just told them to listen:
“What I have is a story.”
At first they all laughed
but this witch said
Okay
go ahead
laugh if you want to
but as I tell the story