radiantfracture (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
radiantfracture) wrote2024-04-03 07:37 am
radiantfracture) wrote2024-04-03 07:37 am
Poem post: Perhaps the World Ends Here
Perhaps the World Ends Here
Joy Harjo
The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.
The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.
We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.
It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.
At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.
Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.
This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.
Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.
We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.
At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.
Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.
* * * * *
Joy Harjo is a member of the Muscogee Nation and was the 23rd US Poet Laureate for three terms.
"Perhaps the World Ends Here" was today's poem on The Slowdown. Of course it made me think of Gaza, and of everyone living at the edge of life and death in their own kitchen, or street, or car.
For me, the pair of "a place to hide in the shadow of terror / a place to celebrate the terrible victory" is a powerful moment in the poem because both are offered as possible and both are awful.
What do you notice or respond to in the poem?
{rf}
Joy Harjo
The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.
The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.
We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.
It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.
At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.
Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.
This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.
Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.
We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.
At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.
Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.
* * * * *
Joy Harjo is a member of the Muscogee Nation and was the 23rd US Poet Laureate for three terms.
"Perhaps the World Ends Here" was today's poem on The Slowdown. Of course it made me think of Gaza, and of everyone living at the edge of life and death in their own kitchen, or street, or car.
For me, the pair of "a place to hide in the shadow of terror / a place to celebrate the terrible victory" is a powerful moment in the poem because both are offered as possible and both are awful.
What do you notice or respond to in the poem?
{rf}
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Have you ever seen Action by Sam Shepherd? It's basically this—the world is ending, so what can you do but throw the last dinner party?
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I have not -- I don't think I've seen any Shepherd play. Should I seek it out?
Feels connected to the On the Beach reading, too.
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12 was okay but kicked me out of class for talking about Foucault too much. In fairness he was nice and did not deserve to have to listen to a 17-year-old rattle on about Foucault just because she had a crush on some postmodernist prof she met at a poetry reading.
The Sam Shepard stuff was that year, though. We called it the Incest Year because we also did Hamlet, Oedipus Rex, some Canadian novel about life on the prairies with incest in it, and the play we were supposed to read was Fool For Love. I was never clear as to whether this was intentional. Anyway we had an assignment where we had to act out a scene from one of the plays in the collection, and my group chose Action and then decided that we liked the play too much to choose one scene so we asked if we could take a period to do the whole thing. I played Jeep and got to smash a chair, which was fun.
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