Joy Harjo's Web Log

May Your Journey Be Beautiful


A little rain has blanketed the earth
Swallows fly out from their adobe house:
Above the door of this adobe, just as we’ve flown up from sleep—
Led by prayers and coffee.
The sun’s great house is shimmering.
We smell gratitude; it tastes of sage and dust.
We’re relish breakfast; we know times when there was none.
Where did these bananas come from? And who picked the coffee beans?
Did anyone sing to the young plants
Pushing urgently from the creative earth?
It’s all happening at the kitchen table: we visit, talk politics.
Who’s fired; who’s hot and not, who’s left and who will return, and how
The price of gas is a perk given to the flunkies of ruin.
The train runs through the pueblo making rough music but doesn’t stop.
We joke: it’s laden with uranium, cattle and oil.
It’s going somewhere else for now. They’ll dump the scraps here later.
We get the politics, just how are we going to dance past this pain?
We needed a little rain.
Later I walk concrete in town to the tribal summit
Datura flowers are closing; someone has to stand guard with the night.
Even mystery needs to be held tenderly.
A Dineh brother stumbles up from the dark with his hands open, for rain:
Hey aren’t you the musician? He asks me for money, for a drink.
I ask him for his name.
We visit, talk politics: it’s the same.
We needed a little rain.
Rain. Rain.
May your journey be beautiful from the sky to this hungry earth.

c Joy Harjo September 2005 Albuquerque