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>> Poetry & Prose is sponsored
by the National Endowment
for the Arts.
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>> My name is Joy Harjo.
I'm the 23rd U.S. Poet Laureate,
a member of the Muscogee
Creek Nation.
And I'm going to read
this poem called Running.
And I think maybe poetry, maybe
human beings, we rely a lot
on memory, we're made of memory.
We're made of memory
of grandparents,
parents, all the way back.
And it includes trees, it
includes the memory of the lands
on which we walked, the waters.
It's all one large story field.
And like this country, if
you think about this country
and where we are now, where we
were then, where we're going
to be, it's an immense
story field
and we all have a part of it.
And we won't truly know who we
are as a single human being,
as a family, as a
country, as a planet,
as part of a whole system until
we're able to really in a way --
the way I see it is that it's
like we all become
all the parts.
At some point we
become all the stories.
At some point we have insight
and compassion for every moment
of history and every story.
And we realize that they're
all of us, it's all part of us.
And this particular poem is --
yeah, it includes some
human memory in it.
And what do you do with it?
I mean sometimes we have
these stories or these moments
or memories and they
make no sense.
It makes no -- there's no
way to make sense of it.
And that's because we
don't have the perspective.
And we can find that
perspective.
Poetry I think for me leads --
it helps me find at least
a moment or a sliver
of perspective and knowing and
maybe even helps me transcend
or help others transcend
or we find out places,
find ourselves sometimes
in a poem in a place
that is almost undescribable,
but a place that makes sense
of something that didn't before.
Running. It's closing time.
Violence is my boyfriend
with a cross
to bear hoisted on
by the church.
He wears it everywhere.
There are no female
deities in the trinity.
I don't know how
I'm going to get
out of here said the
flying fish to the tree.
Last call.
We've had it with history,
we who look for vision here
in the Indian and poetry bar,
somewhere to the left of hell.
Now I have to find my way,
when there's a river to cross
and no boat to get me there,
when there appears
to be no home at all.
My father gone, chased
by the stepfather's gun.
Get out of here.
I've found my father at the
bar, his ghost at least,
some piece of him
in this sorry place.
The boyfriend's convincing
to a crowd.
Right now, he's the
spell of attraction.
What tales he tells in
the fog of thin hope.
I wander this sad world we've
made with the enemy's words.
The lights quiver like they do
when the power is dwindling
to a dangling string.
It's time to go home.
We are herded like stoned
cattle, like children
for the bombing drill out
the door into the dark street
of this old Indian town where
there are no Indians anymore.
I was afraid of the dark because
then I could see everything,
the truth with its eyes
staring back at me,
the mouth of the dark with its
shiny moon teeth, no words,
just a hiss and a snap.
I could hear my heart hurting
with my in-the-dark ears.
I thought I could take it.
Where was the party?
It's been a century
since we left home
with the American
soldiers at our backs.
The party had long started
up in the parking lot.
He flew through the dark,
broke my strike with a punch.
I went down, then came up.
I thought I could take being a
girl with her heart in her arms.
I carried it for justice.
For the rights of all Indians.
We all have that cross to bear.
Those old ones followed
me, the quiet girl
with the long dark
hair, the daughter
of a warrior who
wouldn't give up.
I wasn't ready yet to
fling free the cross.
I ran and I ran through
the 2 a.m. streets.
It was my way of breaking free.
I was anything but history.
I was the wind.
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