Joy Harjo's "She Had Some Horses"

Use the above link to get to poem. Read it carefully, once through for the experience of it. Put your ear to its hive, drop in a mouse, feel along its walls, and waterski its surface. Then read again to consider the following. Use the questions as a reading and thinking heuristic for your writing. You do not need to answer them boom boom boom.

The poetry foundation piece on Harjo states:

In the poem, "She Had Some Horses," one of Harjo's most highly regarded and anthologized poems, she describes the "horses" within a woman who struggles to reconcile contradictory personal feelings and experiences to achieve a sense of oneness. The poem concludes: "She had some horses she loved. / She had some horses she hated. / These were the same horse." As Field observed, "The horses are spirits, neither male nor female, and, through them, clear truths can be articulated." As Scarry noted, "Harjo is clearly a highly political and feminist Native American, but she is even more the poet of myth and the subconscious; her images and landscapes owe as much to the vast stretches of our hidden mind as they do to her native Southwest."

Look in the poem for evidence that these horses represent a female speaker reconciling contradictory personal feelings. Feelings about what?

Do you agree with Field that the horses are spirits, neither male nor female? Why, why not?

What "clear truths" do you see being articulated?

What lines indicate Harjo's feminist and political sensibility?

Reflect on the last lines of the poem. How do these help (or not) to provide a resolution?