This Morning I Pray for My Enemies by Joy Harjo

This Morning I Pray for My Enemies

by Joy Harjo

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.

This poem is from Harjo's 2015 book, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, from Norton. The book won the Wallace Stevens award and is filledwith amazing poems, such as the one above. In an interview about this book that she did with The Kenyon Review, Harjo stated, "Everyone is finding their way somehow or the other. We take detours, explore, give up, then take it up again. This process can happen within a second or take years. A single poem can embody this process, or a book of poems can do the same, even a life of poetry. What attracts me about poetry is that a poem makes a concise universe within which you can move, with time, timing, rhythm, with words and meaning." You can read that interview here.

Is Joy Harjo the coolest poet alive today? Well, yes. There are plenty of cool poets--nerd-cool, eco-cool, pop culture-cool, etc., and some who are trying to be cool and it shows and that is not cool--but Harjo is the epitome of cool. Her poems, like the one above, are unlike what others are writing, and her point of view is both grounded in reality and lifted into the air of what we can be if we work towards our ideals.

This poem acknowledges that we have enemies in the first line. After that, we twist from one thing to another, making connections between the sun and our hearts, our hearts and our minds, and then our hearts creating friends from our enemies.

Line you can memorize and quote until everyone gets sick of hearing it:

The door to the mind should only open from the heart.

As you know, I love poems with questions, and I have loved Joy Harjo's poetry since reading "She Had Some Horses" back in the last century sometime; this, this poem got me right away. The bouncing around is wonderful.

The last line is also a great example of the power of words in poems. The last line starts with "enemy" and ends with "friend," much like the poem itself and its hope for our reality. But it also includes the words "risks" and "danger" in between, making a line from enemy to friend, and even more important, the word "becoming." Those 5 words can be played with in so many ways to create so many different, and often opposing, meanings; here, the order points us to one way to resolve conflicts. (Maybe the next administration can give Harjo a Cabinet position!)

Joy Harjo has a website and it includes a video from New Mexico PBS in which Harjo discusses how to be creative and write poetry in times of war. She also has a new book coming out this fall! And another children's book!

Here is her photo from the Poetry Foundation's site, where you can also read more about the poet. This very cool, "whatever" attitude that comes through is in all of her photos except when she is photographed playing the saxophone (yes, you read that correctly) and then she is just cool. Read another of her poems on my blog here.