She Had Some Horses

She Had Some Horses is a 1983 anthology of poetry by Native American author Joy Harjo. Varied in form and syntax, the poems range from concrete to abstract, and from personal to general. Harjo connects the poems with the motif of the horse, an animal she spent time with while growing up in rural Oklahoma. While she pays tribute to its natural beauty, intelligence, and personality, the horse also represents, at different moments, Harjo’s past, present, and possible future selves. The horse also acts as a metaphorical bridge to Harjo’s tribal spiritual roots, romanticizing the joys and sadness of Native life.

The anthology’s titular poem is often considered Harjo’s best work. “She Had Some Horses” has eight stanzas. In each stanza, almost every line begins with the same sentence stem as the name of the poem. The rest of the lines enumerate different categories of horses that the unnamed “she” once owned. As the lines build on each other, it becomes clear that the poem does not refer to literal horses; rather, through them, it develops a complex picture of human nature. The horses can be “broken,” are difficult to tame, are insubstantial “bodies of sand” and fast-shifting “skins of ocean water.” Harjo’s references to erosion and change suggest that human nature is undergoing constant renewal.

The next section contrasts nonhuman, elemental imagery against human actions and characteristics that threaten the natural world. Harjo depicts pollution and aggression as two defining features of human civilization. She then broadens the emotional scope of her description of people, highlighting their virtues as well as their vices. Horses dance in their mothers’ arms, have affinities for different music, and are truth-tellers. Many of these images allude to fragments of Native American myth. The horses are occasionally described as self-aware: in one section, some of them give the name “horse” to themselves, with the knowledge that all horses do not necessarily have names. Here, Harjo suggests that humans’ identities evolve as they experience life, questioning the accuracy of ascribing static names to changing beings.



Much of the latter half of the work is about the darker, more reactionary, and hostile impulses in human nature. Harjo depicts horses that scream “out of fear of the silence” and horses that bring knives wherever they go, hoping to fend off ghosts. Her poems sympathize with these subjects, but still point out the flaws in their kinds of reasoning. These flaws are often based in religion. Harjo is less sympathetic for individuals who blindly follow religious dogma at their own existential cost, writing of horses who kneel “for any savior,” or who simply pray even as they are being marginalized or attacked.

“She Had Some Horses” ends abruptly and ambivalently. Harjo writes, “She had some horses she loved / She had some horses she hated.” This ending points to a paradox: the horse, a stand-in for human nature, contains multitudes of impulses, experiences, and judgments that have been listed throughout the whole poem. Love and hate, then, too, coincide in human nature. She Had Some Horses celebrates the complexity of the Native American subject, who is able to claim her individuality and strength even while paying respect to her weaknesses.