
Intro
Joy Harjo’s ode to family, to ancestry, and to the woman’s body, truly makes sense if we understand that for Harjo, there is no line separating the natural world and her human body — that for her the evolutionary impulse is one of the imagination: “I was a thought, a dream, a fish a wing”. In “Granddaughters,” she celebrates the body and the dynamic force of nature.
By Joy Harjo
I was a thought, a dream, a fish, a wing
And then a human being
When I emerged from my mother's river
On my father's boat of potent fever
I carried a sack of dreams from a starlit dwelling
To be opened when I begin bleeding
There's a red dress, deerskin moccasins
The taste of berries made of promises
While the memories shift in their skins
At every moon, to do their ripening
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2019 by Joy Harjo, “Granddaughters” from An American Sunrise (W.W. Norton & Company, 2019.) Introduction copyright © 2024 by The Poetry Foundation.
If you liked what you just read and want more of Our Brew, subscribe to get notified. Just enter your email below.
Related Posts
Honoring an Internationally-acclaimed Pampango Poet
Feb 10, 2025
Extreme Unction
Feb 04, 2025
A Sprig of Kamuning
Jan 16, 2025