American Life in Poetry: ‘Granddaughters’

By Kwame Dawes

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.

Granddaughters

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

Poem copyright 2019 by Joy Harjo, “Granddaughters” from “An American Sunrise” (W.W. Norton & Company, 2019). American Life in Poetry is made possible by the Poetry Foundation and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. We do not accept unsolicited submissions.