To Light

At the spring
we hear the great seas traveling
underground,
giving themselves up
with tongue of water
that sing the earth open.

They have journeyed through the graveyards
of our loved ones,
turning in their grave
to carry the stories of life to air.

Even the trees with their rings
have kept track
of the crimes that live within
and against us.

We remember it all.
We remember, though we are just skeletons
whose organs and flesh
hold us in.
We have stories
as old as the great seas
breaking through the chest,
flying out the mouth,
noisy tongues that once were silenced,
all the oceans we contain
coming to light.

~ Linda Hogan ~
(Seeing Through the Sun)

Web version: www.panhala.net/Archive/To_Light.html

Hogan's ancestry is Chickasaw, but she has written that her family's military background meant that she grew up in a peripatetic way that denied her any sense of belonging to an individual Native community, mostly living in Colorado and Oklahoma.

She was the first member of her family to go to school, and not only did well there but went on to receive her MA from the University of Colorado in 1978. She began writing professionally while working in a career for orthopedically handicapped children.
Published work

Hogan has published works in many different backgrounds and forms. Her concentration is on environmental themes (she has acted as a consultant in bringing together Native tribal representatives and environmental campaigners) and feminist themes, particularly allying them to her Native ancestry. All of her work, whether fiction or non-fiction, displays a holistic understanding of the world.

Hogan has also written historical novels that focus on the historical wrongs done to both Native Americans and the American landscape during the colonization of North America.

Hogan has also been employed as a professor at the University of Oklahoma, publishing essays on Native American literature.
Bibliography

* The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir (2001)
* The Sweet Breathing of Plants: Women and the Green World (2000)
* Power (1998)
* Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World (1995)
* Solar Storms (1995)
* Book of Medicines (1993)
* Red Clay: Poems and Stories (1991)
* Mean Spirit (1990)
* Savings: Poems (1988)
* Seeing Through the Sun (1985)
* Eclipse (1983)
* Daughters, I Love You (1981)
* A Piece of Moon (1981)
* Calling Myself Home (1978)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Hogan_%28writer%29