And then I'll read this one called, "Rainy Dawn."
Another rain poem.
I have several rain poems, but that's
from living in the desert so much.
But when my daughter Rainy Dawn was born,
it was a hot July afternoon in Albuquerque, New Mexico, when
everyone was wishing for rain.
And so, we were thinking about that,
and I wrote the poem as she was turning 14 here in Tucson.
And I was thinking about how poems can be a place to live.
They give us-- they can help us move through massacres,
through regimes, through shifts in government that
portend danger.
They can help us as we move through grief of death,
through grief, through celebration of birth.
They're like songs, they're song language.
They help us.
They have kinetic energy that helps
us move into those kinds of places
where we are often beset by wordlessness.
And sometimes there's wordlessness
when you're dealing with a child going from a man to a-- boy
to a man, or a girl to a woman.
Because that age is so powerful, and when there's power
there can be chaos.
It's dangerous.
And I was watching my daughter who was always--
did well in school and was well-behaved,
but she was one of the dangerous ones, who I knew
she was going to be trouble.
I saw there was--
but I knew she would be fine.
She's incredible person, human being.
So I wrote this poem when she was 14, thinking about that day
she was born, and how we needed rain
and how we needed her to be like rain in our lives to continue
the story of the people.
So this was for Rainy Dawn, and I've
come to realize that it's also a poem for bringing rain.
"Rainy Dawn."
And that's her name.
"I can still close my eyes and open them four floors up,
looking South and West from the hospital.
The approximate direction of Acoma.
And farther on to the roofs of the houses
of the gods who have learned there
are no endings only beginnings.
That day so hot, heat danced in waves off bright car tops.
We both stood poised at that door from the East,
listened for a long time to the sound of our grandmother's
voices, the brushing wind of sacred wings,
the rattle of raindrops in dry gourds.
I had to participate into the dreaming of you into memory.
Cupped your head in the bowl of my body
as ancestors lined up to give you
a name made of their dreams, cast once more
into this stew of precious spirit and flesh.
And let you go, as I am letting you go once more
in this ceremony of the living.
And when you were born, I held you
wet and unfolding like a butterfly, newly born
from the chrysalis of my body.
And breathed with you, as you breathed your first breath.
Then was your promise to take it on like the rest of us,
this immense journey for love, for rain."