A History of Kindness

ISBN-13: 9781948814256

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Torrey House Press

Publication Date: 06-02-2020

Pages: 142

Product Dimensions: 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

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.

Read an Excerpt

Old Mother

Sitting on the large stone old mother says
I feel it breathing. And it is, as if she opened the world life where everything does breathe like the waves of far ocean taking in air, giving out the cloud waters passing over us right now.
The bison breathed this air, she says,
and people from other nations.
Don't you hear it all singing, even the stars above hidden by daylight, the waters beneath us,
and the first cry of your children when they arrive from the birth waters to air.
She is the one showing a way as she points her feather.
Every path is right, she says. It matters not which one you follow, just breathe and sing as you pass along, loving every other traveler.


The Buffalo Again

This morning I woke to find the buffalo out behind the horses.
It was eating the longer blades of grass. I worried about blades.
I worried about its tongue. Then I thought it wanted to speak.
Old Mother believed it wanted to tell us about the long great


absence


the silence.


Absences

Who knows the deep tunnels of snakes and that their dens near the spring have been lived in a thousand generations?

They shed their skin so perfectly even the eye remains in the body sleeve with scale, rattle, reptilian odor,
all of a piece near the scraping stone.

Such absences remind me of how the missing remains present,
my uncle's toes shot off,
his phantom pain with no nerve or bone, no flesh to back it up,
but still hurting.

I know what’s gone can aggrieve deep as the forest once here,
all the invisible creature life still falling unseen through deep leaves and branches downed,
the majestic endangered missing the beautiful gone.

Absence is the missing presence that travels everywhere at once.

One day my eyes were awake and I have to tell you
I saw the spirit of my horse and how she lived with herself standing tall in the field,
then bent, eating the ends of green grasses.
I hope it is true,
that we are never so far away and the absent will remain with us forever even the remembered and loved child was taken away,
but when do we have something back?

Table of Contents

Book 1 The Body Life 1

The Red Part 3

When the Body 5

Bathing with Tender Care 7

About Myself 9

Lost in the Milky Way 10

What We Kept 12

Recuerdo 14

The Feet and Where They Travel 15

Lies bout the Body 16

Down from the Sky 17

Bone, Looking at the Pieta 19

If Home Is the Body 20

The Fingers, Writing 22

Bones at the River 24

Creation 26

The Maps 28

Skin 30

The Pine Forest Calls Me 31

Nativity 33

Embodied 34

Book 2 Old Mother 37

Eagle Feather Prayer 39

We Have Walked Down Past 40

Walking by Stolen Creek 41

Buffalo Road: Leaving South Dakota 42

Old Mother 44

That Stone from the River 45

The Buffalo Again 46

The Names of Creeks 47

The Mountain Between 50

A Need for Happiness 51

Outside My Cabin 53

Old Mother Remembers 55

Memory 56

Watching Over 58

We Used to Have Pearls 60

Holly Springs, Mississippi 61

Distance Not Time 63

Book 3 The Radiant Field 65

God of the Prairies 67

One Creation 68

Ceremony for the Seeds 69

The Radiant Field 70

A History of Kindness 71

Remember 73

Sweet Silence 75

Honey. My Friend 77

Sunshine 79

Some New Marvel 81

Isn't It Love 83

The Writing of Snow 85

The Long Clouds 86

War Story: Heard 88

Fences 89

Tulsa 90

All Angels in the Dark 92

Peeling an Apple 94

Book 4 The Other Country 95

A Night in Turkey 97

The Camel 99

In the Great Desert 100

Home on the Island 101

Sky Above a Crumbling World 103

River Singing 105

Book 5 The Current Veins 107

The Kill 109

The Bears Eating 111

Burying the Horse 112

Haunting 117

To Be Held 119

Arctic Night, Lights Across the Sky 120

Dear-Child 121

Absences 122

Water Gods of the Next World 124

Fawn 126

This Morning 128

I Saw Them Dancing 129

For the Women 130

White Deer, Your Direction I Follow 131

Grace 133

Here Is 135

The Current Veins of History 136

Author's Note and Acknowledgments 139