She actively conveys these ways of knowing. When Anglo readers encounter the literature of Native writers, they are being introduced to a different world view—quite simply, a different way of knowing the world and being in it. As Cook emphasizes, moreover, it’s important to understand that Hogan’s writing locates itself “at the intersection of environmental matters and the historical and ongoing treatment of American Indians, thus linking environmental justice and social justice issues” (1).

To give readers an illustration, I turn to the poem “What We Kept,” collected in A History of Kindness, which addresses the historical colonizers in a statement of loss and its consequences,

Citing other losses through history, as well as how colonizers exploited the indigenous peoples, the poem sums up: “we give to you/ knowledge you don’t hear,/ the new mind you can’t accept” (13). Native peoples, however, keep “the soul/ that belongs to the land,” which the colonizers can never take from them. As Hogan’s poem makes clear, generally, reverence for the earth characterizes a key difference between Native and industrial Anglo cultures.

While I was writing this introduction this summer, much of the U.S. sweltered under a heat dome caused by manmade climate change. It is urgent that our country begin to listen when Native peoples are sharing traditional knowledge, and to notice when they are modeling “the new mind,” which we all must come to understand and cultivate. For instance, as Hogan advises in the moving poem, “Trail of Tears: Our Removal,” addressed to those now living on land from which the Cherokee and Chickasaw, among other tribes, were infamously removed: “So have compassion for that land at least.” Broadly, in a recent book of essays, The Radiant Lives of Animals, Hogan grieves the loss of species that is happening around the world before our eyes. The ongoing sixth mass extinction and human cruelty to animals have made her “re-minded.” Perhaps the time has come for us all to seek re-minding.

Hogan’s work has garnered much recognition over the course of her career, and until very recently, when health issues narrowed her schedule, Hogan has been in much demand as featured activist-writer and speaker on such issues as the environment, eco-feminism, and the relocation of Native Americans. Her poetry collection, Seeing Through the Sun (1985), won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation; another collection, The Book of Medicines, was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist (1993); and her novel Mean Spirit was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize (1991). In addition to poetry, Hogan has written novels and essay collections, as well as a memoir,  The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir (2001). With the writer and environmentalist Brenda Peterson, she has co-authored Sighting: The Gray Whales’ Mysterious Journey (2002), and co-edited the anthology The Sweet Breathing of Plants: Women and the Green World (2001).  Her most recent essay collection, The Radiant Lives Of Animals: Essays, received the 2022 Science Literature Award from the National Book Foundation. Among her other honors are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim Foundation, and the Thoreau Prize from PEN. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo has described Hogan’s poetry as “a medicine of sorts,” and reading her recent collections of poems, Dark, Sweet: New and Selected Poems (2014) and A History of Kindness (2020), I have found that to be the case—medicine for body and soul. I am thrilled to share with you these beautiful new poems from the great Linda Hogan.

1. Linda Hogan, A History of Kindness: Poems (Torrey House Press, 2020), 26. Hereafter cited parenthetically in text as Kindness, followed by the page number.
 
2. Barbara J. Cook, From the Center of Tradition: Critical Perspectives on Linda Hogan (University Press of Colorado, 2003), 1.
 
3. See the Poetry Foundation site for Linda Hogan: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57881/trail-of-tears-our-removal.
 
4. Małgorzata Poks. Decolonial Animal Ethics in Linda Hogan’s Poetry and Prose: Toward Interspecies Thriving (Routledge, 2024), 13.

Photography by Debbie Hall

 
The buffalo in the back field is covered with clumps of snow,
fur thick, knotted with small twigs,
gnarls of darkness
and heavy skin I can’t divine
where she came from
but Old Mother says
she crossed over
Highway 70 from where Buffalo Bill
was buried the next hill over,
leaving the herd.
 
Do you remember him and his show? Red Cloud was there.
Now it’s the name of the school where your baby went.
My girl, she said, you need
to understand time and how it travels.
They did, those crossing space to other countries,
the broken, beautiful warriors all still
except Bill. What had he done in this world
but starve people and kill,
and here we are across time
when he killed the most buffalo;
that was his fame,
and even with none nearby
this one is here
away from the herd.
 
Those great leaders, even with grief,
they laughed together at night
when the light-bearded man left.
They talked and laughed together.
 
They still loved life,
so why don’t you?

 
Singing,
the cedar
unlocks itself to water others
when there is drought.
It sends its water through saved roots
to other roots.
 
Leave us stand for the leaves of others
now open enough to hold
like a cup, they say,
then pour ourselves on the leaves below,
then fall to the ones beneath them
who will then remember to open buds
in their history of becoming leaves,
and singing, they remember
that first falling, the scent.
Such beautiful rain.
 
Our Love is the call to your forest cathedral,
and you, rain, know we accept you,
we need you,
every complicated and brilliant
being here. Spring buds are waiting
that first opening of clouds.
The tips of Evergreens are wanting to grow.
Leaves begin to form.
Fluids rise. They rise, then fall, and rise
when trees sing.
 
Some humans hear this song.
They lay with an ear on the tree.
I lie down with the forest
and listen, not also for the heartbeat that cannot be seen
only heard, only felt
and then the first drops of rain
touch my skin,
touch the bark
touch the earth
the whole earth
touched.

Photography by Debbie Hall

 
There is a woman who lives on a bed.
She is awake
watching the magpie that comes each morning.
Awake, she listens to the creek downhill,
and how one bird answers another.
She smells moist earth at sunrise
and memorizes how light
falls each day through a different angle of window.
 
She read about a bed-fast woman who heard a wild snail
eating leaves beside her bed.
She lived with that beautiful snail
beside her. Soon they knew one another.
In my world such true connection is honest love.
 
I too wanted snails.
But I live already
with wasps here many generations
who know me well enough
to ask to be let out for their daily chores.
 
They hunger and thirst in the fall
so I also feed them
before their deaths
then close the windows and doors against winter freeze.
Each night, too, I hear, feel, and love the cat,
softly purring beside me.
 
One cold night I went outside to look
at the lynx who appeared from a Northern sky constellation.
God knows there are medicines
walking forward in the cold of winter.
Here, the most powerful
is the walker on stones, rock walls, water or ice.
I know her lookout; Mountain lion, up there on the stone,
and she knows mine.
For her
I was named as a child.
We are kin of the same ilk,
and always I want to walk away with her,
the young, across the winter shine of the universe,
away from the body curve still in the bed.

 
for Norma Kassi
 
Far north, My Friend,
your life is sinking,
your people leaving
the melting world with nothing
to embrace and hold the trees
as they are falling, those beautiful branches and leaves,
along with brush and dark sweet berries
plunging into mud that once was lake.
Rotting leaves now become poison
against this earth in the great betrayal
of elements become mercury
and the large lake
sinking into itself,
leaving the beloved animals
no place to go,
the birds without water
for landing or leaving.
They are gone and like you
only one came home.
 
This your father divined long ago,
just one bird arriving.
For hundreds of years the migrating birds
too many to count,
now are missing, those
who knew by stars the feel of earth,
those winged first people belonging
to the waters and when that one arrived
you held tight
and made for it a lake,
small and then smaller
but still more than none.
You offered
its last given rite.

Photography by Debbie Hall

 
for Dennis Martinez
 
A bird in the Compass North-Amazon
is known to create
the loudest sound on earth.
Once he was silent,
small dark claws wrapped about a thin branch,
all pale chest feathers, shining eyes awaiting the female
who comes to him
before he turns and screams.
Is she deafened after this blaring call?
Does she remain with him
after the voice he uses so forcefully?
No. She goes into the rest of his life,
though you would think the sound injurious
as a jackhammer
might damage her delicate feathers.
 
Maybe he knows the workers are cutting trees.
He is saying they are cutting and burning
the bird-holy-world
to make rancheros and drill sacred earth.
He is saying this is how much he is broken
at the beautiful life falling before them,
falling before us,
or what I know in this world: Scream,
this bird will call out this sound,
loudest of all on earth.
 
And so would I
if only I could.

 
Pretty Shield, even then, said nobody believed
the white man could kill all the buffalo.
No one believed in an evil that large.
 
Still some don’t believe they can
empty this world of an entire presence
and diminish the whole of our lives.
 
One country now closes in on another
telling themselves which are not real humans
and in truth too many do believe it.
 
What really is belief? Simply a convenient thought?
But I saw the lemon trees, so beautiful,
before they destroyed them all.
 
The humans and other graceful animals
had gone to those trees, even bitter. Singing birds as well.
Haven’t you seen them just as they were golden?
 
Later the believers dozed all the olives
so many years ago some barely remember
that no one fought back.
 
In my life, I’ve seen how the thread of evil
may stretch across any continent or ocean
with men following their orders, however wrong.
 
Did you ever think there might be this violent eradication?
Do you wonder how many other life forms may be feeling it, too,
and remember your god, in whatever form, is watching and listening.

Photography by Debbie Hall

 
Being merely atoms unbound
what if there were a way to open the light
and heal ourselves
simply reaching between those atoms?
Cell to cell, the membrane
lets in even the finest particles, no matter they might
harm our lungs, our stomach, all that desires sweet air
and water fresh from earth.
We are each just one more child
traveling the unimagined universe,
a single organism with only one story
wishing to embrace the immeasurable feel of love.
How simple that should be
when birds have an inner language
passing through the silence that tells them when to rise and fly
all together. Perhaps something waits to be spoken between us;
the sea of which we were first made,
the thinnest skin of dark matter,
then my breath touching yours, so close to me,
the flesh of our lips touching one another, some feeling
rises and we sense something shining in our blood.
We are drinking in the light of stars crossing night sky.
I feel your thoughts, the fragrance of flowers opening
with the light of morning, the dew on petals,
the seed who opens in the rain.

 
The Lovely Word   
 
is the light waiting to be spoken
before and after anything else is said.
 
When talking about the changes in our tribal ways
a friend asked, When did it change? I said, Tomorrow.
 
But we are clever enough to continue creating destruction
as the convolutions of the brain branch into something new
 
and old enough to travel through this dark universe
while earth children have hunger and arms like thin green twigs.
 
What if we created something that could hold us safe
and embrace us with this unmeasured feel of love.
 
It is the way birds have a language passing through their own
silence. It tells them when to rise and fly all together.
 
In the animal realm of our human lives
we wake to find the stories we heard and should have believed
 
because we are only human,
hopefully listening, feeling, and seeing,
 
and isn’t it dark matter between us. Everywhere, they say,
a breath touching me, touching you, thin as a tissue or cell
 
the flesh of our lips touching those of one another,
the sensual feeling that rises so we know something is there.
 
Unseen it may live between your breath and mine.
Even Wind says: Breathe out to me, and in.             

 
Sleep with your face visible so the young will remember you are with them.
You want the others to see your open soul, a flower with petals opening.
Sleep with good breath. Wild creatures will know you still breathe life
and not snip the threads of your making.
No angels will think you’ve left the body
despite what pain made of you yesterday.
In all truth you still want to wake each morning,   
and you must keep away those who wish to take you with them.
In this house of family, we want no harm to others.
In this home of being, this great human cosmos,
there’s meaning in each enchanted body
where elders dwell and want to wake
in the room of morning sun.
Everything has bloomed in there.
 
Now one can afford to be open-hearted and kind,
softly alive as water rains gently from the sky.
Maybe your grandchild brings her child to your arms today,
or tomorrow a neighbor brings fresh cakes.
There is always something sweet showing its face
and the tree I planted is bearing golden nectarines this first time,
preparing to fall.

 
I thank the eagle and Old Mother for this prayer
I send to earth and sky
and to the sacred waters.
 
I thank Old Mother and the golden eagle.
They are the ones who taught me to pray
With no words. They taught the part of me
that is unnamed by anatomy books
and so I stand here
facing you and the rest of creation
also with secret names.
I send this prayer thanking those who risk their lives
for clean, sweet water,
and once again there is the great silence
of what happened to the buffalo
and so hard it is to pray for the shooters
who laughed about hitting the girl
with one good shot.
 
We love our horses. We love the dogs who helped us.
We love the wilderness of buffalo herds.
We are humans
who love,
but I don’t know what they are,
the shooters,
or their purpose for being.
 
With no words, just part of my named self
I hold this fan from Old Mother and the eagle,
With all my strength, I send this prayer
so very silent.

* “A Need for Happiness” and “Eagle Feather Prayer” are reprinted from A History of Kindness by Linda Hogan. Copyright © 2020 by Linda Hogan. Used with permission of the publisher, Torrey House Press, and the author. All rights reserved.

A History of Kindness

Poems by Linda Hogan

Poems from Linda Hogan explore new and old ways of experiencing the vagaries of the body and existing in harmony with earth's living beings. Throughout this clear-eyed collection, Hogan tenderly excavates how history instructs the present, and envisions a future alive with hope for a healthy and sustainable world that now wavers between loss and survival. “Hogan remains awed and humble in this sweetly embracing, plangent book of grateful, sorrowful, tender poems wed to the scarred body and ravaged Earth.” —BOOKLIST "In an age as acrimonious as ours, Linda Hogan’s new poetry collection, A History of Kindness, sounds especially poignant." —THE WASHINGTON POST "There is no one like Linda Hogan. I read her poetry to both calm and ignite my heart. A History of Kindness is a series of oracles rising from the page born out of a life of listening, feeling, responding." —TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS, author of Erosion Available from Torrey House Press and Bookshop.org

Find this and more in ArtsMart