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  • Writer's pictureLori Brack
    • May 29, 2020
    • 1 min read

Listening to the blues

Someone is always leaving

By exile, death or heartbreak.


Be who you are, even if it kills you.

It will. Over and over again.

Even as you live.

(from "Break My Heart")


This horrific country we live in - what's to be said? In an earlier post, a link to Ross Gay's poem about Eric Garner's death, "A Small Needful Fact," may be worth clicking now. I don't know. So, I'm rereading Joy Harjo's poems in An American Sunrise, because listening to the voices of those this horrific country has wronged and wronged and wronged is what I can do today. Thank you, dear Linda, for lending me Harjo's books.


That first cry opens the earth door.

We join the ancestor road.

With our pack of memories

Slung slack on our backs

We venture into the circle

Of creation

And make more --


That's how blues emerged, by the way --

Our spirits needed a way to dance through the heavy mess.

(from "By the Way" for Adrienne Rich)




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