Today is Indigenous Peoples’ Day. For many, this holiday embodies a mixture of emotions: celebration, grief, remembrance, pride.
Poetry Daily seeks to honor the gradation of these experiences by highlighting the sovereignty, histories, and voices of Indigenous peoples.
To commemorate the holiday, we invite you to read this special curation of 5 poems from Poetry Daily’s archive: a small sample of the diversity and innovation of Indigenous poetics.
Put on That KTTN Kinsale Drake They are interludes, too, for drumbeats and throaty covers of well-loved tunes put on by some local boys' gas station banjo and hot-rocket guitar, a strong woman that sings the seasons over a hand drum. READ MORE
I Defer a Second Opinion Joan Naviyuk Kane The light unevenly gray beyond the triple-pane: maybe neglected, or itself, self-filtering. Obscuring as it crystals into existence, as it opaques the hoar on the fence & bract to branch of all my trees. Our yard, my debt. Unpruned lilac, two liability spruce to the north, the ostentatious sprawl of crab apple once fertile next-door— READ MORE
Portrait with Smeared Centuries Michael Wasson I begin the day like any other day: a decade staring back in the rearview mirror of the wrecked pickup truck: you standing so tall you're already headless: until I turn around READ MORE
Pony Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe because the salmonberries weren't good enough the wool blankets weren't good enough for me to be a real Indian like the ones in the movies I was going to need to buy a pony READ MORE
Poetry Daily is grateful to call these poems part of the rich tapestry of poetry we’ve published in the last 27 years. And although we are a digital organization, many of our staff live and work on the traditional lands of the Doeg and Piscataway peoples. These tribes’ love and stewardship of this land has made it possible for Poetry Daily to do this work.
Thank you, dear reader, for being here with us. We hope these poems offer you a few moments of reflection, celebration, and hope.
