Wednesday, July 10, 2019
Tuesday, July 9, 2019
The new poet laureate Joy Harjo
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The poet laureate position is one of the many things that make the Library of Congress great. And the poet laureate will kick off the literary season in Washington, DC.
Here is one of her poems:
'Singing Everything'
Once there were songs for everything,
Songs for planting, for growing, for harvesting,
For eating, getting drunk, falling asleep,
For sunrise, birth, mind-break, and war.
For death (those are the heaviest songs and they
Have to be pried from the earth with shovels of grief).
Now all we hear are falling-in-love songs and
Falling apart after falling in love songs.
The earth is leaning sideways
And a song is emerging from the floods
And fires. Urgent tendrils lift toward the sun.
You must be friends with silence to hear.
The songs of the guardians of silence are the most powerful —
They are the most rare.
“Singing
Everything” copyright © 2019 by Joy Harjo. To be published in “An
American Sunrise,” by Joy Harjo (August 2019; W. W. Norton &
Company). Reprinted in the Washington Post by permission of Anderson Literary Management.
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