A History of Kindness

By Linda Hogan

"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

COLORADO BOOK AWARD WINNER
OKLAHOMA BOOK AWARD WINNER

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.

A major American writer and the recipient of the 2007 Mountains and Plains Booksellers Spirit of the West Literary Achievement Award, LINDA HOGAN is a Chickasaw poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, teacher, and activist who has spent most of her life in Oklahoma and Colorado. Her fiction has garnered many honors, including a Pulitzer Prize nomination and her poetry collections have received the American Book Award, Colorado Book Award, and a National Book Critics Circle nomination. A volunteer and consultant for wildlife rehabilitation and endangered species programs, Hogan has also published essays with the Nature Conservancy and Sierra Club.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Torrey House Press
• Release date: Jun 2, 2020
• ISBN: 9781948814263

Linda Hogan

Linda Hogan is Professor of Ecumenics at the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College, Dublin.

Book preview

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a History of Kindness

a History of Kindness

poems

Linda Hogan

TORREY HOUSE PRESS

Salt Lake City • Torrey

The author is grateful to the following journals and anthologies for publishing some of the poems found in this book: World Literature Today, Cimarron Review, Poetry, Pembroke, Split This Rock, The Eloquent Body, Cutthroat, StorySouth, Thinking Continental, Red Leaf Poetry, Ghost Fishing, Yellow Medicine Review, About Place Journal, Oklahoma Today, Emergence Magazine, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, Beacon, The Radiant Lives of Animals, Poesia Indigena, Ecopoetry, ISLE.

Special thanks to Coffee House Press for permission to reprint Ceremony for the Seeds, a version of which appears in Dark. Sweet.

First Torrey House Press Edition, April 2020

Copyright © 2020 by Linda Hogan

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or retransmitted in any form or by any means without the written consent of the publisher.

Published by Torrey House Press

Salt Lake City, Utah

www.torreyhouse.org

International Standard Book Number: 978-1-948814-25-6

E-book ISBN: 978-1-948814-26-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019952010

Cover design by Kathleen Metcalf

Interior design by Rachel Davis

Distributed to the trade by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution

Torrey House Press offices in Salt Lake City sit on the homelands of Ute, Goshute, Shoshone, and Paiute nations. Offices in Torrey are in homelands of Paiute, Ute, and Navajo nations.

For Kyan Red Star and Kayse Red Star

Contents

Book One: The Body Life

The Red Part

When the Body

Bathing with Tender Care

About Myself

Lost in the Milky Way

What We Kept

Recuerdo

The Feet and Where They Travel

Lies bout the Body

Down from the Sky

Bone, Looking at the Pieta

If Home Is the Body

The Fingers, Writing

Bones at the River

Creation

The Maps

Skin

The Pine Forest Calls Me

Nativity

Embodied

Book Two: Old Mother

Eagle Feather Prayer

We Have Walked Down Past

Walking by Stolen Creek

Buffalo Road: Leaving South Dakota

Old Mother

That Stone from the River

The Buffalo Again

The Names of Creeks

The Mountain Between

A Need for Happiness

Outside My Cabin

Old Mother Remembers

Memory

Watching Over

We Used to Have Pearls

Holly Springs, Mississippi

Distance Not Time

Book Three: The Radiant Field

God of the Prairies

One Creation

Ceremony for the Seeds

The Radiant Field

A History of Kindness

Remember

Sweet Silence

Honey. My Friend

Sunshine

Some New Marvel

Isn’t It Love

The Writing of Snow

The Long Clouds

War Story: Heard

Fences

Tulsa

All Angels in the Dark

Peeling an Apple

Book Four: The Other Country

A Night in Turkey

The Camel

In the Great Desert

Home on the Island

Sky Above a Crumbling World

River Singing

Book Five: The Current Veins

The Kill

The Bears Eating

Burying the Horse

Haunting

To Be Held

Arctic Night, Lights Across the Sky

Dear Child

Absences

Water Gods of the Next World

Fawn

This Morning

I Saw Them Dancing

For the Women

White Deer, Your Direction I Follow

Grace

Here Is

The Current Veins of History

Author’s Note and Acknowledgments

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Book One

The Body Life

When the Body

When the body wishes to speak, she will

reach into the night and pull back the rapture of this growing root

which has no faith in the other planets of the universe,

but her feet have walked in the same bones

of the ancestors over long trails,

leaving behind the oldest forest. They walk on the ghosts

of all that has gone before them, not just plant, but animal, human,

the bones of the ones who left their horses to drink with them

at the spring running through earth’s mortal body

which has much to tell about what happened that day.

When the body wishes to speak from the hands, it tells

how it pulled children back from death and it remembers every detail,

washing the children’s bodies, legs, bellies, the delicate lips of the girl,

the vulnerable testicles of the son,

that future my people brought out of the river

in a spring freeze. That is only part of the story of hands

that touched our future.

This all started so simply, just a body with so much to say,

one with the hum of her own life in a quiet room,

one of the root growing, finding a way through stone,

one not remembering nights with men and guns,

the ragged clothing and broken bones of my body.

Let’s go back to the hands,