May Your Journey Be Beautiful

May Your Journey Be Beautiful


A little rain has blanketed the earth
Swallows fly out from their adobe house:
Above the door of this adobe, just as we’ve flown up
from sleep— led by prayers and coffee.
The sun’s great house is shimmering.
We smell gratitude; it tastes of sage and dust.
We’re relish breakfast; we know times when there was none.
Where did these bananas come from? And who picked
the coffee beans? Did anyone sing to the young plants
Pushing urgently from the creative earth?

It’s all happening at the kitchen table: we visit,
talk politics. Who’s fired; who’s hot and not, who’s left
and who will return, and how the price of gas is a perk
given to the flunkies of ruin.

The train runs through the pueblo making rough music
but doesn’t stop. We joke: it’s laden with uranium,
cattle and oil. It’s going somewhere else for now.
They’ll dump the scraps here later.

We get the politics, just how are we going to dance
past this pain? We needed a little rain.
Later I walk concrete in town to the tribal summit
Datura flowers are closing; someone has to stand guard
with the night. Even mystery needs to be held tenderly.

A Dineh brother stumbles up from the dark
with his hands open, for rain: Hey aren’t you the musician?
He asks me for money, for a drink. I ask him for his name.
We visit, talk politics: it’s the same.
We needed a little rain.
Rain. Rain.
May your journey be beautiful from the sky
to this hungry earth.


c Joy Harjo September 2005 Albuquerque