I'm at work on a couple of projects and one of them
is a historical memoir.
And so that brings up a question,
well, memoir is about memory and how can you
write a historical memoir if it's historical?
But historical memoir lives in us,
DNA, it's a spiral of stories.
I mean, where do our dreams come from?
Where does the stuff of our poems come from?
Where do our thoughts come from?
There's the thoughts and dreams of the land and the stones
and so on, all of the life around us
that moves through us.
And some of that, the history of our voices,
the voices of our ancestors and those who went way forward
and even those who were following us because time
is a continuum without time.
And recently while I wound up in Knoxville
and I told him during my interview, yeah,
there's family history here.
My grandfather of Harjo generations,
Monahwee, used to come up here and steal horses, that's
how he got his warrior name, from stealing horses
right here in Knoxville.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
But he didn't think of Knox, it wasn't--
this was his home.
I mean, he was only claiming property
because the Muskogee Creek Nation was all over,
from Eastern Tennessee down into Georgia,
which is now known as Georgia Alabama or Northern Florida,
and so on.
And so going there has been really important.
I've been on a journey going home, it took a lot,
went through a lot of stories.
We all learn and we help each other along the way.
And so Knoxville, it's been perfect to start
to work on a historical memoir and right now I
don't know where it's going to go.
Whether it's going to be poetry, stories or mixed I've got,
but the next two poems are part of it.
And this one I could only write until last weekend we
went down, my husband Owen and I went down
into Columbus, Georgia.
And we saw the house that one of my great uncles lived in,
he was a historical figure.
We went along the Chattahoochee River where we used to fish
and saw where the Tie Snake lived or still lives
in that river.
We saw all these places that had come through in stories
to our people and it was--
I've been walking around with a heaviness because it's very
heavy in me and yet there's such brightness and it's.
And I told the people, I told the--
I said, yes, we lived and we have children
and there's grandchildren and, you know, we're here.
And so it's about-- that's a story of this country,
It's not just, it's a story of this country.
What an incredible experiment that we're all right here
together but at some point, we all have to sit at the table
together and hear the voices of this place
and acknowledge who we are here together.
So this was a difficult poem to write,
it's called Last Stop on the Trail of Tears.
And there were difficult times in life but all of it in a way
was necessary to understand and, you know,
ultimately there's no judgment, there's only love.
Last Stop On The Trail of Tears.
"It was closing time.
Violence is my boyfriend with a cross to bear,
hoisted on by the church he wore it everywhere.
There are no female deities in the Trinity.
'I don't know how I'm going to get out of here'
said the flying fish to the tree.
Last call, we've all had it with history,
we who look for vision here in the Indian and poetry bar
somewhere to the left of hell.
Now I have to find my way when there's a river to cross
and no boat to get me there, when there appears
to be no home at all, my father gone,
chased by the stepfather's gun, get out of here.
I found my father at the bar, his ghost at least,
some piece of him in this sorry place.
Violence is convincing to a crowd.
He's the spell of attraction.
What stories he makes of hilarious tragedy.
In the fog of thin hope I wander this sad world
we've made with the enemy's words.
The lights quiver like they do when the power is
dwindling to a dangling string.
It's time to go home.
We are herded like stone cattle, like children for the bombing
drill, out the door into the dark street
of this old Indian town.
I was afraid of the dark because I could see everything.
The truth with its eyes staring back at me,
the mouth of the dark with its shiny moon teeth,
no words just a hiss and a snap.
I could hear my heart hurting with my in the dark ears.
We thought we could take it.
Where was the party?
It's been a century since we left home
with the American soldiers at our backs.
The party had long started up in the parking lot,
violence broke --flew through the dark,
broke my stride with a punch.
I went down and came up.
I thought I could take being a girl with her heart
in her arms, I carried it for justice,
for the rights of all of us.
We all had that cross to bear.
Those old ones followed me, the quiet girl
with the long dark hair, in the back
of the back, the daughter of a warrior who wouldn't give up.
How do any of us fleeing free the cross of ruthless history?
I ran and ran through the 2:00 AM streets,
I ran with through the deluge of ancestor tears,
I ran through all their lost sunrises
when we made it back home, I gave it back to the trees,
I became the wind."