GRIEVER's EXCHANGE // Sunrise Ceremony

This is the second GRIEVER’S EXCHANGE, which I’m publishing on the National Day of Mourning, which is also called Unthanksgiving Day, and which is also called Indigenous People’s Sunrise Ceremony—though you may know it as something different.

33rd annual Indigenous People’s Sunrise Ceremony on Alcatraz Island, 2016

FIRST MORNING

by American poet, musician, playwright, and author Joy Harjo, who served three terms as the 23rd United States Poet Laureate—the first Indigenous person to hold that position. Joy Harjo is a member of the Muscogee Nation (Este Mvskokvlke) and belongs to Oce Vpofv (Hickory Ground)

This is the first morning we are without you on earth.
The sun greeted us after a week of rain
In your eastern green and mountain homelands.
Plants are fed, the river restored, and you have been woven
into a path of embracing stars of all colors
Now free of the suffering that shapes us here.

We all learn to let go, like learning to walk
When we first arrive here.
All those you thought you lost now circle you
And you are free of pain and heartbreak.
Don’t look back, keep going.
We will carry your memory here, until we join you
In just a little while, in one blink of star time.

In Joy Harjo’s First Morning, she writes of the first sunrise after a loved one’s passing. She writes in the voice of those left here on earth, waking up to the first full day of mourning in a gesture of compassionate release.

What do you remember about the first morning of mourning after the death of your beloved? And/or of the first morning of mourning after violence, after betrayal, after loss, after whatever source of grief feels most present for you right now. What would honor the person you loved and are still loving? What would honor you, the person who loves despite the ache?

Imagine honoring that love with a kind of presence that divests from traditions of violence. That denounces the culture of erasure. That actively stands against systemic oppression.

Imagine honoring that love with so much honor and love that you refuse any associations with genocide and choose instead to add to coalitions of reparation and equity. Imagine your grief changing you, empowering you. Imagine a personal grief that catalyzes and grows into public, national, global reformation.

If it seems futile or small to simply imagine, consider these words from Iranian-American writer Azar Nafisi: “You need imagination in order to imagine a future that doesn’t exist.”

Imagine the sunrise on a future that loves and honors all people, everywhere.