The Tattooed Poets Project, Day 30: Joy Harjo

Today's poem is from Joy Harjo:

Equinox
by Joy Harjo
I must keep from breaking into the story by force for if I do I will find myself with a war club in my hand and the smoke of grief staggering toward the sun, your nation dead beside you. I keep walking away though it has been an eternity and from each drop of blood springs up sons and daughters, trees, a mountain of sorrows, of songs. I tell you this from the dusk of a small city in the north not far from the birthplace of cars and industry. Geese are returning to mate and crocuses have broken through the frozen earth. Soon they will come for me and I will make my stand before the jury of destiny. Yes, I will answer in the clatter of the new world, I have broken my addiction to war and desire. Yes, I will reply, I have buried the dead and made songs of the blood, the marrow.

Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1951. Her books of poetry include How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems (W.W. Norton & Co., 2002); A Map to the Next World: Poems (2000); The Woman Who Fell From the Sky (1994), which received the Oklahoma Book Arts Award; In Mad Love and War (1990), which received an American Book Award and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award; Secrets from the Center of the World (1989); She Had Some Horses (1983); and What Moon Drove Me to This? (1979). She also performs her poetry and plays saxophone with her band, Poetic Justice. Her many honors include The American Indian Distinguished Achievement in the Arts Award, the Josephine Miles Poetry Award, the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, and fellowships from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Witter Bynner Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Hawaii.

Thanks to Joy for participating in the Tattooed Poets Series! Check out one of her tattoos here.