Poem: This Morning I Pray for My Enemies by Joy Harjo – 1951.
The Poem below is presented by Russell Evans, Associate Lecturer from the School of Society and Culture:
And whom do I call my enemy?
An enemy must be worthy of engagement.
I turn in the direction of the sun and keep walking.
It’s the heart that asks the question, not my furious mind.
The heart is the smaller cousin of the sun.
It sees and knows everything.
It hears the gnashing even as it hears the blessing.
The door to the mind should only open from the heart.
An enemy who gets in, risks the danger of becoming a friend.
Joy Harjo is a Native American poet who is currently Poet Laureate of the US. A member of the Creek nation, Harjo is unusual in blending First Nation symbols, ideas and mythology with feminism and social justice. She wants the reader to think in new ways, as in this poem, which asks the question ‘what does it take to turn an enemy into a friend?’ Despite enduring the suffering of her Nation and also as a woman trying to make her voice heard in the 1970s, Harjo channels the past into concerns about the present. She says, “I feel strongly that I have a responsibility to all the sources that I am: to all past and future ancestors, to my home country, to all places that I touch down on and that are myself, to all voices, all women, all of my tribe, all people, all earth, and beyond that to all beginnings and endings.”
