Former Poet Laureate of the United States Joy Harjo

This is the ninth time in the last five years that I have posted a poem by Joy Harjo, a Muscogee Creek Indian poet who was once Poet Laureate of the U.S. According to Joy’s notes regarding the poem:

I hadn’t been writing long when I wrote this poem. I believe I was still a student at the University of New Mexico. My first few poems were published in the Thunderbird, the student literary magazine. My voice found itself, then rooted itself in the Sandia Mountains, the Rio Grande River, in the sunrises and sunsets of the Southwest. My voice found a place to eat and drink after traveling through worlds and walking through time, a place to replicate the sense of those worlds in words. That’s when I began writing poetry, real poetry, after those first few published poems. Those first attempts were my calling out for poetry to find me.

Remember

Remember the sky you were born under,
know each of the star’s stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother’s, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe.
Remember you are all people and all people
are you.
Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.