Woman Who Fell from the Sky” in 1994. She just published her latest poetry book, “An American Sunrise,” this past fall. She has also written a children’s book, “The Good Luck Cat,” a young adult book, “For a Girl Becoming,” and two plays. She has received numerous fellowships and awards for her writing, including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, the PEN Open Book Award and the American Indian Distinguished Achievement in the Arts Award. Harjo says, “I love to write. Each poem is a discovery project, getting
into that space. You write towards something, even against something.” But she also says that “Writing poetry is the art of listening. You feed your ears with songs—birds songs, sounds of different winds, and learn poems, learn songs, learn different voices.”
MY MAN’S FEET
They are heroic: roots You cannot mistake them For any other six-foot walker I could find them in a sea of feet A planet or universe of feet
They kicked the sky at birth In that town his great-grandfather found My man’s feet left childhood Past the mineral grit of an oil flush bust To these atomic eastbound lands
His feet are made of his mother’s spiritual concern And of his father: historic, and mindfully upright What walkers— From mound builder steps that led to the sky maker Past Spanish galleons, stage coach, and railroad snaker
One generation following another No other feet but these could bare The rock stubborn loyal bear Towering intelligence and children picker upper That is the one who owns these feet.
What an anchor his feet provide For his unmatched Immensability and get up againality
I’ve danced behind this man in the stomp dance circle. Our feet beating rhythm together Man, woman, boy, girl, sun and moon jumper.
My man’s feet are the sure steps of a father Looking after his sons, his daughters For when he laughs, he opens all the doors of our hearts Even as he forgets to shut them when he leaves
And when he grieves for those he loves He carves out valleys enough to hold everyone’s tears With his feet, these feet My man’s widely humble, ever steady, beautiful brown feet.
Reprinted from “An American Sunrise: Poems.” Copyright 2019 by Joy Harjo. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
24 AMERICAN INDIAN WINTER 2019
Perhaps that is why she returned to her first love of music. In her
2012 memoir, “Crazy Brave,” Harjo says her “passage into the world of humanity” occurred through jazz, when as a young child she heard this music playing from her parents’ black Cadillac. She was entranced, yet she had to give up on music when her junior high band teacher told her she could not play a saxophone because she was a girl and her stepfather forbade her to sing. Yet, she says, “I could always hear it when I was writing poetry.” When she was nearly 40, she began to teach herself to play a saxo-
phone while on stage as a companion to her poetry. Many of her songs evoke beatnik scenes of coffee houses in the 1950s and 1960s, as she sometimes speaks more than sings the stanzas of her poems, punctu- ated by bursts of intense sounds from her sax. Other times, she inte-
PHOTO BY PAUL ABDOO, COURTESY OF JOY HARJO
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