Remember by Joy Harjo

Every April, the American Library Association sends out a poster for National Poetry Month. I usually hang these around my desk at work, but this year, as the library building remained closed due to the pandemic, I tacked it up to a wall in my office at home. It's a photograph of artwork by Samantha Aikman, featuring a line from United States Poet Laureate Joy Harjo's poem "Remember" from her 1983 collection She Had Some Horses. Read the poem in full at Poets.org.

It's a beautiful poem, but somehow I only just recently connected it to Octavia Butler's Earthseed books. It is almost impossible not to hear Lauren Olamina in it--her connection to her parents, the land, literature. How her hyperempathy connects her to the world around her in such a visceral way. I would even argue that the poem itself reads a bit like verses from Earthseed: The Books of the Living.

Do you find resonance between "Remember" and the Earthseed books? Has other creative work reminded you of Earthseed?