Tanaya Winder

cantfindit

Poet, writer, and educator Tanaya Winder is an enrolled member of the Duckwater Shoshone Tribe and has ancestors from the Southern Ute, Pyramid Lake Paiute, Navajo, and Black tribes. She grew up on the Southern Ute reservation in Ignacio, Colorado, and earned her BA at Stanford and an MFA from the University of New Mexico. Winder’s collections of poetry include Words Like Love (2015) and Why Storms are Named After People and Bullets Remain Nameless (2017). Poetic Theater Productions performed a suite of Winder’s poems as Love in a Time of Blood Quantum, and she won an Orlando Prize in poetry from the A Room of Her Own Foundation. Source 

And I wonder where you are

Sacred stars blanket a nighttime sky,

each light reminds us of the preciousness of life.

Your memory lives along the Milky Way,

each twinkle saying don’t forget my name.

 

It’s an epidemic, a sickness of the earth,

a war we enter as soon as we are birthed.

Indigenous women, girls, our two-spirit, too.

When did this world start disappearing you?

Published:

2021

Length:

Shorty

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2023

2024

Themes:

Identity

Intersectionality & Culture

Violence & War

Literary Devices:

Metaphor

a comparison between two unrelated things through a shared characteristic

Quatrain

A stanza made of four lines.

Rhetorical Question

a question asked for effect, not necessarily to be answered

Rhyme

correspondence of sound between words or the endings of words, especially when these are used at the ends of lines of poetry