A Map to the Next World

In the last days of the fourth world I wished to make a map for those who would climb end the hole in the celestial expanse

My only tools were the desires of humans as they emerg from the killing fields, from the bedrooms and the kitchens.

For the inner man is a wanderer with many hands and feet

The map must be of sand and can't be read by means of ordinary light. It must carry fire to the nearest tribal town, for renewal of spirit.

In the myth are instructions on the language of the land, in what way it was we forgot to acknowledge the gift, as if we were not in it or of it.

Take note of the proliferation of supermarkets and malls, the altars of currency They best describe the detour from grace.

Keep track of the errors of our forgetfulness; a mist steals our children while we doze

Flowers of rage spring up in the depression, the wonders are born there of nuclear anger.

Tree of ashes wave to good-bye and the map appears to disappear.

We no longer know the names of the birds here, by what mode to speak to them by means of their personal names.

Once we knew everything in this lush promise.

What I am telling you is real and is printed in a warning upon the map. Our forgetfulness stalks us, walks the earth behind us, leaving a trail of paper diapers, needle and wasted life-current

An imperfect map will. have to do little individual

The place of access is the sea of your mother's life-blood your father's small death as he lengthys to know himself in another.

There is no exit.

The map can be interpreted from one side the wall of the intestine-a spiral upon the road of knowledge.

You will travel end the membrane of death, scent cooking from the encampment where our relatives make a feast of new deer meat and corn broth in the Milky Way.

They have at no time left us; we abandoned them for science.

And when you take your nearest breath as we enter the fifth world there will be no X no guide volume with words you can carry.

You will have to navigate by means of your mother's voice, renew the sonnet she is singing.

Fresh courage glimmers from planets.

And lights the map printed with the vital fluid of history, a map you will have to know by means of your intention, by the language of orb of days

When you emerge note the tracks of the wonder slayers where they entered the cities of artificial light and killed what was killing us.

You will diocese red cliffs. They are the heart, contain the ladder.

A white deer will approach to greet you when the last human climbs from the destruction.

Remember the perforation of our shame marking the act of abandoning our tribal sods

We were never finished

Yet, the journey we make together is completed on this earth who was one time a star and made the same mistakes as humans.

We might make them again, she said.

Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or extreme point

You must make your have map.

JOY HARJO, an enlisted member of the Muskoke Nation, has published many volumes including She Had Some Horses, In Mad delight in and War, and The Woman Who savage From the Sky. She co-edited with Gloria Bird, Reinventing the Enemy's Language, Contemporary Native Women's Writing of North America from Norton. She plays saxophone and performs "tribal-jazz-reggae-poetic-rock" with her band transport Harjo & Poetic Justice. "A Map to the nearest World" appeared in Scan, March/April 1998 and "The Path to the Milky Way Leads [i]or[/i] part of to the other Los Angeles" appeared in the UCLA American Indian Quarterly.

photograph by dint of Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie

Copyright World verse Incorporated May/Jun 1999

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