THE MYTH OF BLACKBIRDS
            Joy Harjo
                p. 1994*
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The hours we counted precious were blackbirds in the density of Washington. Taxis toured the 
labyrinth with passengers of mist as the myth of ancient love took the shape of two figures 
carrying the dawn tenderly on their shoulders to the shores of the Potomac.

We fled the drama of lit marble in the capitol for a refuge held up by sweet, everlasting earth. 
The man from Ghana who wheeled our bags was lonesome for his homeland, but commerce made it 
necessary to carry someone else's burdens. The stars told me how to find us in this disorder of 
systems.

Washington did not ever sleep that night in the sequence of eternal nights. There were whirring 
calculators, computers stealing names, while spirits of the disappeared drank coffee at an 
all-night café in this city of disturbed relativity.

Justice is a story by heart in the beloved country where imagination weeps. The sacred mountains 
only appear to be asleep. When we finally found the room in the hall of mirrors and shut the door 
I could no longer bear the beauty of scarlet licked with yellow on the wings of blackbirds.

This is the world in which we undressed together. Within it white deer intersect with the wisdom 
of the hunter of grace. Horses wheel toward the morning star. Memory was always more than paper 
and cannot be broken by violent history or stolen by thieves of childhood. We cannot be separated 
in the loop of mystery between blackbirds and the memory of blackbirds.

And in the predawn when we had slept for centuries in a drenching sweet rain you touched me and 
the springs of clear water beneath my skin were new knowledge. And I loved you in this city of 
death.

Through the darkness in the sheer rise of clipped green grass and asphalt our ancestors appear 
together at the shoreline of the Potomac in their moccasins and pressed suits of discreet armor. 
They go to the water from the cars of smokey trains, or dismount from horses dusty with fatigue.

See the children who become our grandparents, the old women whose bones fertilized the corn. They 
form us in our sleep of exhaustion as we make our way through this world of skewed justice, of 
songs without singers.

I embrace these spirits of relatives who always return to the place of beauty, whatever the outcome 
in the spiral of power. And I particularly admire the tender construction of your spine which in the 
gentle dawning is a ladder between the deep in which stars are perfectly stars, and the heavens 
where we converse with eagles.

And I am thankful to the brutal city for the space which outlines your limber beauty. To the man 
from Ghana who also loves the poetry of the stars. To the ancestors who do not forget us in the 
concrete and paper illusion. To the blackbirds who are exactly blackbirds. And to you sweetheart as 
we make our incredible journey.

                             
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* from _The_Woman_Who_Fell_from_the_Sky_, 1994

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