Tag: name

psychology

She Had Some Horses by Joy Harjo

Posted on by littleREDelf

She Had Some Horses

She had some horses.

She had horses who were bodies of sand.
She had horses who were maps drawn of blood.
She had horses who were skins of ocean water.
She had horses who were the blue air of sky.
She had horses who were fur and teeth.
She had horses who were clay and would break.
She had horses who were splintered red cliff.

She had some horses.

She had horses with long, pointed breasts.
She had horses with full, brown thighs.
She had horses who laughed too much.
She had horses who threw rocks at glass houses.
She had horses who licked razor blades.

She had some horses.

She had horses who danced in their mothers’ arms.
She had horses who thought they were the sun and their bodies shone and burned like stars.
She had horses who waltzed nightly on the moon.
She had horses who were much too shy, and kept quiet in stalls of their own making.

She had some horses.

She had horses who liked Creek Stomp Dance songs.
She had horses who cried in their beer.
She had horses who spit at male queens who made them afraid of themselves.
She had horses who said they weren’t afraid.
She had horses who lied.
She had horses who told the truth, who were stripped bare of their tongues.

She had some horses.

She had horses who called themselves, “horse.”
She had horses who called themselves, “spirit.” and kept their voices secret and to themselves.
She had horses who had no names.
She had horses who had books of names.

She had some horses.

She had horses who whispered in the dark, who were afraid to speak.
She had horses who screamed out of fear of the silence, who carried knives to protect themselves from ghosts.
She had horses who waited for destruction.
She had horses who waited for resurrection.

She had some horses.

She had horses who got down on their knees for any savior.
She had horses who thought their high price had saved them.
She had horses who tried to save her, who climbed in her bed at night and prayed as they raped her.

She had some horses.

She had some horses she loved.
She had some horses she hated.

These were the same horses.

~ Joy Harjo

writing

Plainest Nomer

Posted on by littleREDelf

i believe those Magickal and proper names
to be equally wondrous and profound.
but all good things elemental,
all things strange in nature
resist classification.

They move with the flitting light of Faeries
and fireflies,
here —
— now there.
Give them a name and they change it,
ask for one and they riddle you.

Sometimes a word must be invented
conjured from the nothing
taken from the foundry
where they,
the collection of fragrant and heady muses,
are able to describe the anatomy of a feather
and drop the understanding into your head.

To see in this raw
depends on which eyes you use,
which frame you have,
what mystery you know,
and which name you own.
More, which name you are accustomed to.

And the skill begins to evade us.

We are complicated by deeper things,
coiling black tree bark
growing red rotted roots,
that snake in like cellophane tubes
that used to be sharp fingers,
that used to be vines,
that used to be ruby kernels
stuffed with the ghostmeat of life.

What thoughts were made of,
what devices we allowed them
by calling them out
now pushes our insides apart,
dividing the sense so we are unable to remember
the first seeds of sorrow,
until it blossoms into revulsion.

We cannot come by those names easily now,
the sickness has progressed
to a renaming of our injuries
and insides.
Longer epithets,
chewing on taxonomy until it stretches out
like green-gray taffy.
Coaxing the pedigree from an otherwise
lovely mongrel
until we no longer recognize the ‘dog’
as pet, companion,
and friend.

We cannot help but respond to mythic patterns,
we have archetypes, we have Faerie Tales,
we have tomes of prose and religious books of writ.
It is all the same story and we
are curiously busying ourselves over the centuries
to tell it and deliver it in new ways,
new/old ways of healing the void and sickness
like medicine in variant doses.

We build tolerance in linear progressions:
we try debunking the old.
With great strides of scientific progress
we are fueling inbred science projects of spirituality
always looking for a more efficient way to be sold.

We forget how good it is to be ethereal,
how wondrous is an ancient thought,
how gorgeous it is
to be simple.

The stain of pomegranate under her nails
says she’s been digging again.

i worry . . .
I wonder if she will know what it is
by what it was.

i wonder if she will find her name.

~ Andrea E. Janda

language, writing

let’s pretend . . .

Posted on by littleREDelf

you have a new name
you NEEDED a new name
and maybe the old one
hung off you like a bad suit.

so did you ever wish
you were named differently?

or just gimme nonsense.