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Rhetoric Review
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Grace, A poem
a
Joy Harjo
a
Teaches in the Creative Writing Program , University of Arizona ,
Published online: 21 May 2009.

To cite this article: Joy Harjo (1989) Grace, A poem , Rhetoric Review, 7:2, 380-380, DOI: 10.1080/07350198909388868

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07350198909388868

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 Grace

I think of Wind and her wild ways the year we had nothing to lose
and lost it anyway in the cursed country of the fox. We still talk
about that winter, how the cold froze imaginary buffalo in the stuffed
horizon of snowbanks. The haunting voices of the starved and mutilated
broke fences, crashed our thermostat dreams, and we couldn't stand it
one more time. So once again we lost a winter in stubborn memory, walked
through cheap apartment walls, skated through fields of ghosts into
a town that never wanted us, in the epic search for grace.
Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 05:55 27 December 2014

Like Coyote, like Rabbit we could not contain our terror and clowned
our way through a season of false midnights. We had to swallow
that town with laughter, so it would go down easy as honey. And one
morning as the sun struggled to break ice, and our dreams had found us
with coffee and pancakes in a truckstop along highway eighty; we
found grace.

I could say grace was a woman with time on her hands, or a white
buffalo escaped from memory. But in that dingy light it was a promise
of balance. We once again understood the talk of animals, and spring was
lean and hungry with the hope of children and corn.

I would like to say, with grace, we picked ourselves up and walked

into the spring thaw. We didn't; the next season was worse. You went
home to Leech Lake to work with the tribe and I went south. And Wind,
I am still crazy. I know there is something larger than the memory
of a dispossessed people. We have seen it.

(for Jim Welch, and for Wind)

—Joy Harjo

380 Rhetoric Review, VoL 7, No. 2, Spring 1989