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Who kills my history

By Joan Houlihan Joan Houlihan

Who kills my history knows

it is buried

in the same air ay breathe.

Only a hair is needed to keep you, mother.

Only a fit of bone.

Comfort, comfort, ay am my own.

Wanting simple, a sun like water, a flow and stir of air.

Warm stone, black-warm, dirt scent and bird.

Ay am put out to weather.

Animal eyed me here—heaving, breathing over—

felt by smell for me and loomed.

Air shifted my hair as it neared and sniffed

then left. Comfort, comfort me.

A thresh of sticks and vine, hand-carried

high—ay am my own weight carried by,

kind horse, kind mother, gone.

FOOTNOTES: The Us is a formally fractured poetic sequence spoken by a chronically nomadic people. A member of the group (Ay) dramatizes the coming to self-consciousness of an individual in the group.—JH

Source: Poetry (December 2008).

Biography

Joan Houlihan's most recent book of poetry, The Us (2009), was named a "must read" book of 2009 by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Lucie Brock-Broido called the poems in The Us "just extraordinary: wildly hewn, classically construed, and skewed by an imagined lexicon...In a voice that is elemental, ancient, animistic, pre-lingual even, the speaker manages, with nothing short of magic, to communicate...in a language both . . .

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