WEBVTT

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And then I'll read this
one called, "Rainy Dawn."

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Another rain poem.

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I have several rain
poems, but that's

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from living in the
desert so much.

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But when my daughter
Rainy Dawn was born,

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it was a hot July afternoon in
Albuquerque, New Mexico, when

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everyone was wishing for rain.

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And so, we were
thinking about that,

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and I wrote the poem as she
was turning 14 here in Tucson.

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And I was thinking about how
poems can be a place to live.

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They give us-- they can help
us move through massacres,

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through regimes, through
shifts in government that

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portend danger.

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They can help us as we move
through grief of death,

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through grief, through
celebration of birth.

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They're like songs,
they're song language.

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They help us.

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They have kinetic
energy that helps

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us move into those
kinds of places

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where we are often
beset by wordlessness.

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And sometimes
there's wordlessness

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when you're dealing with a child
going from a man to a-- boy

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to a man, or a girl to a woman.

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Because that age is so
powerful, and when there's power

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there can be chaos.

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It's dangerous.

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And I was watching my
daughter who was always--

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did well in school
and was well-behaved,

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but she was one of the
dangerous ones, who I knew

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she was going to be trouble.

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I saw there was--

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but I knew she would be fine.

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She's incredible
person, human being.

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So I wrote this poem when she
was 14, thinking about that day

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she was born, and
how we needed rain

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and how we needed her to be like
rain in our lives to continue

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the story of the people.

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So this was for
Rainy Dawn, and I've

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come to realize that it's
also a poem for bringing rain.

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"Rainy Dawn."

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And that's her name.

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"I can still close my eyes
and open them four floors up,

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looking South and West
from the hospital.

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The approximate
direction of Acoma.

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And farther on to the
roofs of the houses

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of the gods who
have learned there

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are no endings only beginnings.

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That day so hot, heat danced
in waves off bright car tops.

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We both stood poised at
that door from the East,

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listened for a long time to
the sound of our grandmother's

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voices, the brushing
wind of sacred wings,

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the rattle of raindrops
in dry gourds.

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I had to participate into the
dreaming of you into memory.

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Cupped your head in
the bowl of my body

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as ancestors lined
up to give you

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a name made of their
dreams, cast once more

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into this stew of
precious spirit and flesh.

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And let you go, as I am
letting you go once more

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in this ceremony of the living.

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And when you were
born, I held you

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wet and unfolding like
a butterfly, newly born

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from the chrysalis of my body.

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And breathed with you, as you
breathed your first breath.

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Then was your promise to take
it on like the rest of us,

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this immense journey
for love, for rain."

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