For Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, Whose Spirit Is Present Here and in the Dappled Stars
Joy HarjoLangue: anglais
Beneath a sky blurred with mist and wind
I am amazed as I watch the violet
Heads of crocuses erupt from the stiff earth
After dying for a season
As I have watched my own dark head
Appear each morning after entering
The next world to come back to this one
Amazed
It is the way in the natural world to understand the place
The ghost dancers named
After the heart breaking destruction
Anna Mae
Everything and nothing changes
You are the shimmering young woman
Who found her voice
When you were warned to be silent, or have your body cut away
From you like an elegant weed
You are the one whose spirit is present in the dappled stars
(They prance and lope like colored horses who stay with us
Through the streets of these steely cities. And I have seen them
Nuzzling the frozen bodies of tattered drunks
On the corner.)
This morning when the last star is dimming
And the busses grind toward
The middle of the city, I know it is ten years since they buried you
The second time in Lakota, a language that could
Free you
I heard about it in Oklahoma, or New Mexico
How the wind howled and pulled everything down
In righteous anger
(It was the women who told me) and we understood wordlessly
The ripe meaning of your murder
As I understand ten years later after the slow changing
Of the seasons
That we have just begun to touch
The dazzling whirlwind of our anger
We have just begun to perceive the amazed world the ghost dancers
Entered
Crazily, beautifully
I am amazed as I watch the violet
Heads of crocuses erupt from the stiff earth
After dying for a season
As I have watched my own dark head
Appear each morning after entering
The next world to come back to this one
Amazed
It is the way in the natural world to understand the place
The ghost dancers named
After the heart breaking destruction
Anna Mae
Everything and nothing changes
You are the shimmering young woman
Who found her voice
When you were warned to be silent, or have your body cut away
From you like an elegant weed
You are the one whose spirit is present in the dappled stars
(They prance and lope like colored horses who stay with us
Through the streets of these steely cities. And I have seen them
Nuzzling the frozen bodies of tattered drunks
On the corner.)
This morning when the last star is dimming
And the busses grind toward
The middle of the city, I know it is ten years since they buried you
The second time in Lakota, a language that could
Free you
I heard about it in Oklahoma, or New Mexico
How the wind howled and pulled everything down
In righteous anger
(It was the women who told me) and we understood wordlessly
The ripe meaning of your murder
As I understand ten years later after the slow changing
Of the seasons
That we have just begun to touch
The dazzling whirlwind of our anger
We have just begun to perceive the amazed world the ghost dancers
Entered
Crazily, beautifully
envoyé par Pierre-André Lienhard - 22/7/2025 - 16:11
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On the 1997 album "Letter From the End of the Twentieth Century" by Joy Harjo & Poetic Justice
Lyrics [1986] and Music by Joy Harjo
The song honors the spirit of Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash, a Mi'kmaq activist who dedicated her life to help Indian people everywhere, organizing social care, involved with educational projects and participating to protests. She was involved with the American Indian Movement (AIM), participated in the Wounded Knee occupation in 1973, became the higher-ranked woman in the AIM. She disappeared in December 1975 and was found murdered in February 1976. She was 30 years old. (For further details, see the accompanying notice to the song "Anna Mae" by Larry Long)
At the time Harjo wrote the poem/song, the murder of Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash was still a cold case.