From Joy Harjo:
This is hard. The word beautiful is considered overused and even too romantic these days, but I use it often.
So then I went to shimmer. I love the onomatopoeia. Shimmer is shimmer. It is what it is, and the word can cast a quality of light or lightness of being over the whole area where it is placed. It’s a light that carries within it many layers of shimmering worlds.
I also went to jetty, which would be opposite shimmer on the word spectrum. It’s action, not diffuse. Punchy, and it juts.
Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma and is a member of the Mvskoke Nation. Her seven books of poetry, which include such well-known titles as How We Became Human, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, and She Had Some Horses have garnered many awards. These include the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas, and the William Carlos Williams Award.