All men knew a secret of the northern partof an old world, a less perfectidea. For the bicornuate woman,it was an island. Though its birdslose our trust, we might learntheir language. After all, we havebeen taught to read and write,to remove our hands from other workas we watch water twist into rock:to cover our wounds,staying alive light after light.For something, I worry.The moon pronounced with clarityits known topography. Our lettersand lists, reconstructed grammars:they replace the ways in which we weregrabbed, and pushed, then shoved.Set a wife and her childrento rove with indefinite orders:lineal migration on a small scaleis not nautical, but conflictual. Of those men,we knew I could never dothem any good. In this wayI forget, and let the windriver. It gales and tearsat my shoulders and wrists.
Rookeries
Feature Date
- June 30, 2021
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Copyright © 2021 by Joan Naviyuk Kane.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Joan Naviyuk Kane is Inupiaq with family from Ugiuvak and Qawiaraq. The author of several collections of poetry and prose, she currently teaches in the Department of English at Harvard University, and is a lecturer in the Departments of Studies in Race, Colonialism and Diaspora and English at Tufts University, and was founding faculty of the graduate creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She was a Visiting Fellow of Race and Ethnicity at The Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University in 2020-2021, and the 2021 Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Creative Writing and Journalism at Scripps College. Her second book, Hyperboreal (winner of the 2012 Donald Hall Prize), will be published in translation by Editions Caractères this summer, and a collection of new poems, Dark Traffic, will be published in the Pitt Poetry Series in September. She raises her sons as a single mother in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Joy Harjo, the first Native poet to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate, has championed the voices of Native peoples past and present. Her signature laureate project gathers the work of contemporary Native poets into a national, fully digital map of story, sound, and space, celebrating their vital and unequivocal contributions to American poetry.
This companion anthology features each poem and poet from the project—including Natalie Diaz, Ray Young Bear, Craig Santos Perez, Sherwin Bitsui, and Layli Long Soldier, among others—to offer readers a chance to hold the wealth of poems in their hands. The chosen poems reflect on the theme of place and displacement and circle the touchpoints of visibility, persistence, resistance, and acknowledgment. Each poem showcases, as Joy Harjo writes in her stirring introduction, “that heritage is a living thing, and there can be no heritage without land and the relationships that outline our kinship.” In this country, poetry is rooted in the more than five hundred living indigenous nations. Living Nations, Living Words is a representative offering.
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