“They, too, wanted to love but did not know how to say it
…What a wild dilemma,
How to make it to the stars on a highway slick with fear.”
~Joy Harjo in her memoir Poet Warrior
Wild Dilemma
I write a prayer poem
Of protection
Over my brothers who remain.
That their hearts might not be sick
With rot.
That the many cages the world builds for them
Cannot steal the iron of
Their blood.
That the lack of direction
From figures of fathers
Does not shrink them into mice,
Franticly running at every wall in the maze.
I pray a security
A joke
A comic book character who
Survives it all in the end.
Pray that the lessons they didn’t get
Do not become links in an unbroken chain,
Tethering them to the trauma roots
Circling behind them infinitely.
I pray the unstoppable love of our mother
Who, in spite of everything
Broken and hurt,
Hung the pictures they drew in jail and sent to her
on the walls.
Her love
Never never never
Learning
Never never never
Knowing better
I pray the love that is willfully blind
To sustain them.
To remind them
That love too
Circles them infinitely.
Citation: Harjo, Joy. Poet Warrior. 1st edition, New York, NY, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2021.