Native American poems are deeply spiritual, rooted in nature, memory, and ancestral identity. They often reflect a powerful connection to the earth, animals, sky, and sacred traditions passed down through generations. Unlike many Western poetic forms, Native poetry frequently blends storytelling, chant, and prayer.
Traditional oral poems from tribes like the Navajo Nation, Cherokee Nation, and Lakota Sioux Tribe focus on creation stories, healing rituals, and harmony with nature. These poems are not just art—they are part of ceremonies and community life.
Modern Native American poets such as Joy Harjo and Sherman Alexie bring contemporary themes into their work. They explore identity, displacement, cultural survival, and resilience while honoring tradition. Joy Harjo, a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, often writes about memory, land, and the spiritual strength of Indigenous women.
Grief Calls Us to the Things of This World
By Sherman Alexie
The eyes open to a blue telephone
In the bathroom of this five-star hotel.
I wonder whom I should call? A plumber,
Proctologist, urologist, or priest?
Who is blessed among us and most deserves
The first call? I choose my father because
He’s astounded by bathroom telephones.
I dial home. My mother answers. “Hey, Ma,”
I say, “Can I talk to Poppa?” She gasps,
And then I remember that my father
Has been dead for nearly a year. “Shit, Mom,”
I say. “I forgot he’s dead. I’m sorry—
How did I forget?” “It’s okay,” she says.
“I made him a cup of instant coffee
This morning and left it on the table—
Like I have for, what, twenty-seven years—
And I didn’t realize my mistake
Until this afternoon.” My mother laughs
At the angels who wait for us to pause
During the most ordinary of days
And sing our praise to forgetfulness
Before they slap our souls with their cold wings.
Those angels burden and unbalance us.
Those fucking angels ride us piggyback.
Those angels, forever falling, snare us
And haul us, prey and praying, into dust.
Speak in the Age of Season
By Crisosto Apache
in a chance of season, natural & unheard voices shutter,
millions have gone about wavering false phallic order,
bound in endless sets of survival habits and good aim,
like the Sarracenia purpurea, they just cannot help it—
speak through skins of trees and endure the shapes of men,
speak through granules inside mountains which define cement
lines for skyscrapers,
speak through flow of shallow rivers and extend arches of cradles,
speak through eyes and watch leaves sway about a docile breeze,
speak through fire which destroys mountainsides and gives birth to stars,
speak through continental reaches which mimic conduit spines
of a billion oppress backbones,
speak through mantle of spirits in perpetual flight, flying together
with their diminishing teeth exposed,
speak through each bod which mimics moonlight and sunlight
stealing measure of fraying memories in existence,
speak through hair as it is set to flame and releases a flight
of clouds for nourishment,
speak through palms facing upward toward the sky, shaking
the faces behind white picket fences,
speak through sunken boats which build ancient mausoleum
as windows where mounds cease to exist,
speak through bluish puss which pools near smooth and tighten skins
of settling history and tilting sacred toils,
speak through souls of deer cries in darkening darkness as voices
of dynasties shatter rainstorms,
speak through droplets which pour down on hallow surfaces
and on perfect porches of HUD homes,
speak through the hour which carves paths into stone feet
and cracks ankles through small rumbling canyons,
speak through safe hands which lead out the screaming caverns
of blind oxidizing memories,
speak through constellation which guide but are now gone
as dead eighteenth century soldiers,
speak through a need to live through pages hidden over frozen
bodies of untold stories,
speak again, through bodies which are now empty vessels and remain
as webs, in the ebb of morning mist
Anasazi
By Tacey M. Atsitty
How can we die when we're already
prone to leaving the table mid-meal
like Ancient Ones gone to breathe
elsewhere. Salt sits still, but pepper's gone
rolled off in a rush. We've practiced dying
for a long time: when we skip dance or town,
when we chew. We've rounded out
like dining room walls in a canyon, eaten
through by wind—Sorry we rushed off;
the food wasn't ours. Sorry the grease sits
white on our plates, and the jam that didn't set—
use it as syrup to cover every theory of us.
Goodbye to All That
By Kimberly Blaeser
i.
He could have taken you prisoner, of course
when our two tribes were at war
over whitefish and beaver territory
and the Anishinaabeg chased your Indian ancestors
from the woodlands he now brings you home to.
Or your Dakota relatives might have waged a war party
on their swift plains’ ponies to avenge your taking
and bring you back from those uncivilized
they named in disgust the rabbit-chokers.
But those histories of dog-eaters and Chippewa crows
are just a backdrop now for other stories
told together by descendants of smallpox survivors
and French fur traders,
clan members of Wolf and of Water Spirit.
And now you gather,
trackers and scouts in new bloodless legal battles,
still watch for mark and sign—
for the flight of waterbirds.
ii.
Old histories that name us enemies
don’t own us; nor do our politics
grown so pow-wow liberal you seldom
point out the follies of White Earth tribal leaders.
(Except of course for the time our elected chair
mistakenly and under the influence of civilization
drove his pickup down the railroad tracks
and made the tri-state ten o’clock news.)
And Sundays behind the Tribune
he seldom even mentions the rabid casino bucks
or gets out his calculator and with lodge-pole eyebrows
methodically measures beaded distances,
results of territorial lines drawn in your homeland.
And even though I have seen him sniff, glance over
he really almost never checks the meat in your pot,
nor reconnoiters the place of your rendezvous
just to be sure.
Ah, Ah
By Joy Harjo
Ah, ah cries the crow arching toward the heavy sky over the marina.
Lands on the crown of the palm tree.
Ah, ah slaps the urgent cove of ocean swimming through the slips.
We carry canoes to the edge of the salt.
Ah, ah groans the crew with the weight, the winds cutting skin.
We claim our seats. Pelicans perch in the draft for fish.
Ah, ah beats our lungs and we are racing into the waves.
Though there are worlds below us and above us, we are straight ahead.
Ah, ah tattoos the engines of your plane against the sky—away from these waters.
Each paddle stroke follows the curve from reach to loss.
Ah, ah calls the sun from a fishing boat with a pale, yellow sail. We fly by
on our return, over the net of eternity thrown out for stars.
Ah, ah scrapes the hull of my soul. Ah, ah.
The History of Red
By Linda Hogan
First
there was some other order of things
never spoken
but in dreams of darkest creation.
Then there was black earth,
lake, the face of light on water.
Then the thick forest all around
that light,
and then the human clay
whose blood we still carry
rose up in us
who remember caves with red bison
painted in their own blood,
after their kind.
A wildness
swam inside our mothers,
desire through closed eyes,
a new child
wearing the red, wet mask of birth,
delivered into this land
already wounded,
stolen and burned
beyond reckoning.
Red is this yielding land
turned inside out
by a country of hunters
with iron, flint and fire.
Red is the fear
that turns a knife back
against men, holds it at their throats,
and they cannot see the claw on the handle,
the animal hand
that haunts them
from some place inside their blood.
So that is hunting, birth,
and one kind of death.
Then there was medicine, the healing of wounds.
Red was the infinite fruit
of stolen bodies.
The doctors wanted to know
what invented disease
how wounds healed
from inside themselves
how life stands up in skin,
if not by magic.
They divined the red shadows of leeches
that swam in white bowls of water:
they believed stars
in the cup of sky.
They cut the wall of skin
to let
what was bad escape
but they were reading the story of fire
gone out
and that was a science.
As for the animal hand on death’s knife,
knives have as many sides
as the red father of war
who signs his name
in the blood of other men.
And red was the soldier
who crawled
through a ditch
of human blood in order to live.
It was the canal of his deliverance.
It is his son who lives near me.
Red is the thunder in our ears
when we meet.
Love, like creation,
is some other order of things.
Red is the share of fire
I have stolen
from root, hoof, fallen fruit.
And this was hunger.
Red is the human house
I come back to at night
swimming inside the cave of skin
that remembers bison.
In that round nation
of blood
we are all burning,
red, inseparable fires
the living have crawled
and climbed through
in order to live
so nothing will be left
for death at the end.
This life in the fire, I love it.
I want it,
this life.
