THIS TOO SHALL PASS →

When I was young and turned to my mother in moments of childish distress, she would stare into the distance and then say, “This too shall pass.” Although he didn’t agree with my mother about much, my father had a similar, though grimmer, perspective: “In a hundred years we’ll all be be dead.” In an extraordinarily moving op-ed piece in today’s New York Times, Joy Harjo, the United States poet laureate and a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation, offers an enriched picture of the vastness of time. The piece celebrates this month’s Supreme Court ruling that under a promise made under an 1866 treaty between the United States and the Creek nation, much of Oklahoma is still sovereign tribal land. While the ruling upheld the specifically legal autonomy of the Creeks, it represented much more than that to them, according to Harjo. It represented justice, writ large and timeless:

“The elders, the Old Ones, always believed that in the end, there would be justice for those who cared for and who had not forgotten the original teachings, rooted in a relationship with the land. I could still hear their voices as we sat out on the porch later that evening when it cooled down. Justice is sometimes seven generations away, or even more. And it is inevitable,” she writes.

Enlarging our concept of the scope of time, the poet delivers a potent narrative nugget that stands as a prose poem. “An elder explained to me once, pressing her fingers together, ‘See this?’ I could see no light between her fingers. ‘This is the time since European settlement.’ Then, she spread her arms from horizon to horizon: ‘This is the whole of time.’