Joy Harjo

Well I finally made it, the last blog. Today I would like to write about Joy Harjo's "Mourning Song". This format is very different to what I am used to and what we have been reading in the past. This poem was one stanza long with 13 single spaced lines. I felt as though I was reading a paragraph instead of a poem. As I had guessed, the title gave away the poem. It is clear to me that this is about a person who no longer wants to mourn death, but to create a song about it instead, "Make a song for death, a song with yellow teeth and bad breath. For lonliness, / the house guest who eats everything and refuses to leave." (lines 9-11). If you have read any of my blogs, you will know that I generally like to pull a few quotes from the poems we read and share them. Within Joy Harjo's "Mourning Song", I found one inparticular quote that I loved and I still am not sure why. The quote reads as follows, "If we cry more tears we will ruin the land with salt," (lines 8-9). I guess the reason I like this quote so much is it took me back down memory lane when I was a child and would lick my tears. It made me remember just how salty they were and the fact that Harjo related that to death and ruining the land was very creative in my eyes. I don't really have much to say beside thank you for an amazing semester and increasing my ability to understand and analyze poems. I can truly say this course was a valuable learning experience and has increased my knowledge not only of poetry but what is inside the poetry.