liv ❁'s Reviews > She Had Some Horses: Poems

This is some of the first poetry I’ve sat down and read in my life and now I’m mourning the time lost with years of my life filled with a weird aversion to poetry because this is one of the best things I have ever read. Harjo has such an incredible way of using words to convey such strong emotions. I picked this up on a whim today and sat, reading it aloud to myself, until I finished it. There were multiple times where I had to stop because I was so amazed that I couldn’t find the words to keep reading for a moment. The introduction on Harjo’s connection to horses was such a beautiful way to start this collection as well.

I’m not too well-versed (ha ha) in writing reviews for poetry yet, so I’ll let the collection speak for itself through some of my favorites; maybe after poetry summer I’ll be able to convey my awe with proper words.

Vision
The rainbow touched down
“somewhere in the Rio Grande,”
we said. And saw the light of it
from your mother’s house in Isleta.
How it curved down between earth
and the deepest sky to give us horses
of color
horses that were within us all of this time
but we didn’t see them because
we wait for the easiest vision
to save us.
In Isleta the rainbow was a crack
in the universe. We saw the barest
of all life that is possible.
Bright horses rolled over
and over the dusking sky.
I heard the thunder of their beating
hearts. Their lungs hit air
and sang. All the colors of horses
formed the rainbow,
and formed us
watching them.


She Remembers The Future
“We are closer than
blood,” Noni Daylight
tells her. “It isn’t
Oklahoma or the tribal
blood but something more
that we speak.”

(The otherself knows
and whispers
to herself.)

The air could choke, could
Kill, the way it tempts
Noni to violence, this
morning. But she needs
the feel of danger,
for life.

She feels the sky
tethered to the changing
earth, and her skin
responds, like a woman
to her lover.
It could be days, it could
be years, White Sands
or Tuscon.
She asks,
“Should I dream you afraid
so that you are forced to save
yourself?”

Or should you ride colored horses
into the cutting edge of the sky
to know

that we’re alive
we are alive.”


II. Two Horses

I thought the sun breaking through Sangre de Cristo
Mountains was enough, and that
wild musky scents on my body after
long nights of dreaming could
unfold me to myself.
I thought my dance alone through worlds of
odd and eccentric planets that no one else knew
would sustain me. I mean
I did learn to move
after all.
and how to recognize voices other than the most familiar.
But you must have grown out of
a thousand years dreaming
just like I could never imagine you.
You must have
Broke open from another sky
to here, because
now I see you as a part of the millions of
other universes that I thought could never occur
in this breathing.
And I know you as myself, traveling.
In your eyes alone are many colonies of stars
and other circling planet motion.
And then your fingers, the sweet smell
of hair, and
your soft, tight belly.
My heart is taken by you
and these mornings since I am a horse running towards
a cracked sky where there are countless dawns
breaking simultaneously.
There are two moons on the horizon
and for you
I have broken loose.


4.5/5