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    Memory Keeper: Poems
    Memory Keeper: Poems
    Memory Keeper: Poems
    Ebook117 pages47 minutes

    Memory Keeper: Poems

    By April Tierney

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    About this ebook

    What is the embodied shape of memory? How is it cared for and set down into the hearts of future generations? Where lives the land of forgetting? Throughout these poems, April Tierney weaves together personal, collective, ancestral, and land-based memory into a single, glistening cloth. She courts the cultural necessity of tending to what might

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWayfarer Books
    Release dateApr 19, 2022
    ISBN9781956368130
    Memory Keeper: Poems
    Author

    April Tierney

    April Tierney lives in the foothills of the Colorado Rocky Mountains with her husband, young daughter, mischievous dog, and wide web of kin. She is the author of three full length collections of poetry, as well as the co-author of a chapbook and photographic anthology. Her writing has been featured in The Wayfarer Magazine, Orion, and Real Ground Journal, among other publications.

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      Book preview

      Memory Keeper - April Tierney

      WAYFARER BOOKS

      WWW.WAYFARERBOOKS.ORG

      © 2022 TEXT BY APRIL TIERNEY

      Wayfarer Books support copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing us to continue to publish books for every reader.

      Quantity sales. Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, bookstores, and others. For details, contact the publisher or visit wholesalers such as Ingram or Baker & Taylor.

      All Rights Reserved

      Published in 2022 by Wayfarer Books

      Cover Design and Interior Design by Leslie M. Browning

      Cover Image © Patrimonio

      ISBN 978-1-956368-06-2

      ISBN 978-1-956368-13-0 (e-book)

      First Edition Trade Paperback

      10 98 76 54 32 1

      Look for our titles in paperback, ebook, and audiobook wherever books are sold. Wholesale offerings for retailers available through Ingram.

      Wayfarer Books is committed to ecological stewardship. We greatly value the natural environment and invest in environmental conservation. For each book purchased in our online store we plant one tree.

      CONTENTS

      Burrs in Your Heart

      Making Real

      My Grandmother is the Wind

      In Love with the World

      Interspecies Music Making

      Bearing Witness

      The Right Kind of Question

      Morning Prayers

      How Things Are

      Weaving the World

      Mythic Days

      Becoming

      What Goes and What Stays Behind

      Articles of Faith

      Do You Ever Think About the Days

      Heaping Portions

      The Most Natural Thing in the World

      Her Violation

      Dear European Descendants

      Insatiable

      Guardians of the Dance

      The Cost of Consumption

      A Truthful World

      Falling Into Remembrance

      Wilderness of Grief

      Storylines

      Ancient Wisdom

      Silences

      Nighthawks

      The Anthropocene

      Wasted

      Familial Grounds

      Shoveling Pain

      Miscarriages of Justice

      Poetry of the Sacred

      Senseless Deaths

      What is Lost

      The Gods’ Garden

      Field Guides for Liberation

      Burnt Sienna

      Freights of Light

      I Will Breathe For You

      Hand Spun

      A Waking Dream

      Wild Turkeys

      Headwaters of the Soul

      Ich Liebe Dich

      Continuing On

      In the Absence of Consent

      Spell Casting

      Having Tears At All

      Mr. Montmorency

      Something More

      Between the Stars

      The Ballad of My Dreams

      It Could Also Be True

      About the Author

      About the Press

      For Sloane

      BURRS IN YOUR HEART

      One morning, after a hike up the mythical mountain

      that looks out over our home, I sit on the deck

      picking burrs out of my socks—

      it’s late July and the grasses are going to seed,

      which means they are enacting that brilliant,

      evolutionary ritual of sending their offspring

      along in my clothes to propagate this land

      far and wide with their future exultation—

      when a memory pierces my heart

      just like those little, gold spears now

      being carried off by the wind.

      It’s a memory of the time I listened

      to a Hinóno'éí elder and master storyteller

      weave magic into the world. She talked

      about the childhood pain of being forbidden

      to speak her native language at school,

      and so lost it

      at too ripe an age.

      Which meant she also lost

      the ability to converse

      with her grandmother

      at the end of her life.

      She told stories about Thanksgiving,

      and how perplexed her people were

      that a single day in all of the year

      should be reserved for gratitude,

      when they began each morning this way.

      So her family had no problem with gathering

      for the holiday, although it was no different

      than any other time of giving ordinary thanks.

      She spoke about speaking,

      and how she could go on forever.

      How her community would gather round

      to listen to her tell stories, but would always

      bring food to whet the appetite of her tongue first;

      fragrant soups

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