I must keep from breaking into the story by force
During my first visit to the United States in 2014 (I came to cover the Miami Book Fair), I wanted to visit Joy Harjo in Oklahoma, but was unable to make the trip. It was only in 2016 that I met her at the Miami Book Fair.
I had been told she didn't give interviews, only readings. However, I asked Lisa Palley, the Book Fair's media manager, to intercede. She did so and Harjo agreed to record some poems for Latin American and Spanish-speaking audiences for La Maja Desnuda.
When we met, I fell under the spell of her sylvan gaze. I felt I was before a kind of astrolabe that ponders the silences of heaven and earth. She read us her verses and sang, and her song caught up and drew together the invisible threads that tie us to those who came before us. Here is the recording we made for the Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo, reciting-singing her verses:
Joy Harjo is poet, storyteller, and musician. A descendant of the original peoples of the United States of America, she was born in 1951 and belongs to the Myskoke Nation. Harjo is the first Native American Poet Laureate of the United States (2019-2020). Steeped in the culture of her ancestors, her poetry finds inspiration in the symbols and oral traditions of the first peoples. Her verses are suffused with the values, memories, and feelings of native Americans and defend their human rights.
The most recent of her important collection of poetry books is titled "An American Sunrise" (2019). She has been awarded the William Carlos Williams Poetry Prize as well as the Wallace Stevens Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Arts of the American Indian (2015).
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.