Joy Harjo's Web Log

It’s morning in Honolulu in this difficult world. My cardinal neighbor acknowledged it with a song. When I stepped out into the quiet I gave thanks for this embrace of peace. The Pacific is rolling in, from here looks like sloppy two feet waves. Still, I’d like to go out and paddle into what my spirit knows there. I breathe it in. Breathe out the worries, overwhelming sadness. Elections are being held in Iraq that aren’t true elections. Let people decide for themselves. They aren’t; the conquerors are deciding all this because they believe that the oil and resources are theirs by divine right. There’s no ruse anymore. The lies are sheer, transparent. It’s been happening here, on this island, in this country for years. We forget.


Now, who do I talk on behalf of my poet friend who starts back at a job in the East where she is denigrated and unappreciated? Despite the bad treatment she’s set up one of the best reading series in the country and runs a writing center. This is a full time job. Then they added a class for her to teach, then another and another. It wasn’t in her contract but they require it because they can, because somebody will do it if she doesn’t because these jobs are hard to come by. And to whom do I report a relative who will continue on this journey today less part of a leg and an injury inflicted by a faulty surgical procedure for which he’ll most likely receive no compensation because, ironically, he doesn’t have money to pursue a wrong doing? And a cousin knocked down by a stroke who is standing up again, leaning at the kitchen sink making breakfast for herself this morning, trying to make it alone in a little house far from the Oklahoma she fled as a champion barrel racer? Her daughter is nearby, but dragged far, far away into a drug oblivion. Where is her circle of family? And who will take the hands of my beloved sister crippled by rheumatoid arthritis and ease out the knots of rage, of pain?


What poet will come along and sing beautifully and dangerously?
Of all this, all this.

The Chinese New Year’s parade was cancelled on Saturday due to heavy rains, storms. I was disappointed. I looked forward to pushing my friend’s wheelchair through the festivities. The island was flooded with rain. So much rain that the sewers overflowed in the bay where we paddle. Yesterday was our first day out of off-season paddling, after it was suspended because of our New Year’s Eve incident. It was a beautiful morning after the rain as we gathered there. But the water was turgid and brown with sewage here in beautiful Hawaii. We humans are destroying this place. We paddled out with a heaviness, a sadness.

I delighted seeing lightning, hearing thunder. Lightning doesn’t visit here very frequently.

Soon I will be in their realm, as I fly from Honolulu to Los Angeles. It's important to acknowlege the beings of that realm.