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Ocean Power: Poems from the Desert (Volume 32)
The annual seasons and rhythms of the desert are a dance of clouds, wind, rain, and flood—water in it roles from bringer of food to destroyer of life. The critical importance of weather and climate to native desert peoples is reflected with grace and power in this personal collection of poems, the first written creative work by an individual in O'odham and a landmark in Native American literature.
Poet Ofelia Zepeda centers these poems on her own experiences growing up in a Tohono O'odham family, where desert climate profoundly influenced daily life, and on her perceptions as a contemporary Tohono O'odham woman. One section of poems deals with contemporary life, personal history, and the meeting of old and new ways. Another section deals with winter and human responses to light and air. The final group of poems focuses on the nature of women, the ocean, and the way the past relationship of the O'odham with the ocean may still inform present day experience. These fine poems will give the outside reader a rich insight into the daily life of the Tohono O'odham people.
Poet Ofelia Zepeda centers these poems on her own experiences growing up in a Tohono O'odham family, where desert climate profoundly influenced daily life, and on her perceptions as a contemporary Tohono O'odham woman. One section of poems deals with contemporary life, personal history, and the meeting of old and new ways. Another section deals with winter and human responses to light and air. The final group of poems focuses on the nature of women, the ocean, and the way the past relationship of the O'odham with the ocean may still inform present day experience. These fine poems will give the outside reader a rich insight into the daily life of the Tohono O'odham people.
100 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 1995
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234 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
February 20, 2018
I am so happy that I found this book at Antigone Books during a recent visit to Tucson. Zepeda is a member of the Tohono O'odham tribe, formerly known as the Papagos. Her poems express life in the desert. Some are bilingual. Many include elements of chant, with strong rhythms, repeated words and phrases, with themes that describes community activities. I was enchanted by the description of women watching the sky, smelling the desert earth after rain, using their towels to wipe their faces in the summer heat.
I also enjoyed the shorter poems near the end of the book, especially, "Morning Air." Zepeda describes the beautiful intimacy between the human body and the air it resides in.
This is, I believe, Zepeda's first book of poetry. It makes me hungry to read more by her. I'm just sorry that I left town before I could get her to sign my copy at a reading she gave at the store shortly after my departure.
I also enjoyed the shorter poems near the end of the book, especially, "Morning Air." Zepeda describes the beautiful intimacy between the human body and the air it resides in.
This is, I believe, Zepeda's first book of poetry. It makes me hungry to read more by her. I'm just sorry that I left town before I could get her to sign my copy at a reading she gave at the store shortly after my departure.
Read
June 26, 2025unintentionally perfectly timed read as I watched the summer rains come in while facing east toward the huachuca mountains. emerging greenly, in colors of blue, whitely, in colors of black. until reddening, they are right here. "cloud song" pg. 15
March 1, 2012
Beautiful collection of poems about memories of rain, the desert, being a woman and the sea by a Tohono O'Odham poet.
Morning Air
The early morning air,
enveloped in heavy moisture.
I go outside and it lays on my shoulders.
I go about my business,
carrying the morning air
for the rest of the day.
Morning Air
The early morning air,
enveloped in heavy moisture.
I go outside and it lays on my shoulders.
I go about my business,
carrying the morning air
for the rest of the day.
January 23, 2019
Something endearing and enduring about reading a book of poetry when you are well familiar with the places mentioned -- Sells Arizona, Ajo, Organ Pipe Cactus National Park, the White Dove -- and when you love the places and happenings that are written about -- monsoon rains, saguaro blooms, summer heat and winter light. These are desert poems for people who love the desert.
March 18, 2013
I do not read O'odhom, so I cannot begin to reflect on the poems that have no English translation in this bilingual volume. The poetry I could and did read is beautiful and drops the reader into the dust and heat and feelings and the O'odhom lands. Recommended.
October 7, 2012
Second time reading in preparation for her upcoming talk/reading at the Heard Museum in Phoenix and it was as delightful as the first.
November 12, 2008
Beautiful, in dialogue with my soul.
July 31, 2025
We are not ready to be here.
We are not prepared in the old way.
We have no medicine
We have not sat and had our minds walk through the image
of coming to this ocean.
We are not ready.
I have been searching for more of Ofelia Zepeda's works for years, and so grateful I was able to find these. The Tohono O'odham people were my first large-scale work with Native Americans, when I was working on a kidney transplant floor, and I was inspired to start my journey of learning more about the original inhabitants of this land. They have the highest rates of Type II diabetes in the US and world, something like over half of people over 35 and their kidneys fail much faster than some other populations.
Wind
The wind was whipping my clothes harshly around me,
slapping me,
hurting me with the roughness.
The wind was strong that evening.
It succeeded in blowing my clothes all around me.
Unlike others I revel in it.
I open my mouth and breathe it in.
It is new air,
air, coming from faraway places.
From skies untouched,
from clouds not yet formed.
I breathe in big gasps of this wind.
I think I know a secret, this is only the opening act
of what is yet to come.
Cewagi
Pi șa:muñim 'ab dahă.
'ab dahă kc ab beihim g gewkdag
'ab beihim 'amjed g s-ke:g hewel.
'I:da gewkdag mo na:nko ma:s.
'I:da gewkdag mo d 'ep ge'e tatañ.
'I:da tatañ mat 'ab amjed o si 'i-hoi g jewed.
'I:da tatan mo we:s 'an 'i t-bijimidahim.
Summer clouds sit silently.
They sit, quietly gathering strength.
Gathering strength from the good winds.
This strength that becomes the thunder.
The thunder so loud it vibrates the earth.
The thunder that surrounds us.
Morning Air
The early morning air,
enveloped in heavy moisture.
I go outside and it lays on my shoulders.
I go about my business.
carrying the moming air
for the rest of the day.
Ocean Power
Words cannot speak your power.
Words cannot speak your beauty.
Other times we crossed on the desert floor.
That land of hot dry air
where the sky ends at the mountains.
That land that we know
That land where the ocean has not touched for thousands of years.
We do not belong here.
this place with the sky too endless.
This place with the water too endless
This place with air too thick and heavy to breathe.
This place with the roll and roar of thunder always playing to your ears.
We are not ready to be here.
We are not prepared in the old way.
We have no medicine
We have not sat and had our minds walk through the image
of coming to this ocean.
We are not ready.
We have not put our minds to what it is we want to give to the ocean.
We do not have cornmeal. feathers, nor do we have songs and prayers ready.
We have not thought what gift we will ask from the ocean.
Should we ask to be song chasers
Should we ask to be rainmakers
Should we ask to be good runners
or should we ask to be heartbreakers.
No. we are not ready to be here at this ocean.
The Tohono O'odham, formerly known as the Papago numbers somewhere between 18,000 and 21,000, now 34,000. The people live in southern Arizona and northern Sonora. Mexico, residing primarily on three reservations: Wa:k. or San Xavier, near Tucson; the main reservation where the tribal agency is in the town of Sells. Arizona: and a third reservation near Gila Bend. Arizona. Many O'odham also live in or near the various border towns of Casa Grande, Ajo. Florence, and Eloy, and in rural communities such as Stanfield. Arizona. Others live in the major cities of Tucson and Phoenix.
By virtue of population and land, the Tohono O'odham tribe is significant in the United States. Its population and reservation size is second in the Southwest only to the Navajo nation. Because the Tohono O'odham is a desert tribe, however, it is not commonly known among non-Indians. Contemporary sociological and ethnographic information on the O'odham is available in a book by Bernard Fontana and John P. Schaefer. Of Earth and Little Rain (University of Arizona Press, 1990). A historical account is provided in Sharing the Desert: The Tohono O'odham in History by Winston Erickson (University of Arizona
Press. 1994).
We are not prepared in the old way.
We have no medicine
We have not sat and had our minds walk through the image
of coming to this ocean.
We are not ready.
I have been searching for more of Ofelia Zepeda's works for years, and so grateful I was able to find these. The Tohono O'odham people were my first large-scale work with Native Americans, when I was working on a kidney transplant floor, and I was inspired to start my journey of learning more about the original inhabitants of this land. They have the highest rates of Type II diabetes in the US and world, something like over half of people over 35 and their kidneys fail much faster than some other populations.
Wind
The wind was whipping my clothes harshly around me,
slapping me,
hurting me with the roughness.
The wind was strong that evening.
It succeeded in blowing my clothes all around me.
Unlike others I revel in it.
I open my mouth and breathe it in.
It is new air,
air, coming from faraway places.
From skies untouched,
from clouds not yet formed.
I breathe in big gasps of this wind.
I think I know a secret, this is only the opening act
of what is yet to come.
Cewagi
Pi șa:muñim 'ab dahă.
'ab dahă kc ab beihim g gewkdag
'ab beihim 'amjed g s-ke:g hewel.
'I:da gewkdag mo na:nko ma:s.
'I:da gewkdag mo d 'ep ge'e tatañ.
'I:da tatañ mat 'ab amjed o si 'i-hoi g jewed.
'I:da tatan mo we:s 'an 'i t-bijimidahim.
Summer clouds sit silently.
They sit, quietly gathering strength.
Gathering strength from the good winds.
This strength that becomes the thunder.
The thunder so loud it vibrates the earth.
The thunder that surrounds us.
Morning Air
The early morning air,
enveloped in heavy moisture.
I go outside and it lays on my shoulders.
I go about my business.
carrying the moming air
for the rest of the day.
Ocean Power
Words cannot speak your power.
Words cannot speak your beauty.
Other times we crossed on the desert floor.
That land of hot dry air
where the sky ends at the mountains.
That land that we know
That land where the ocean has not touched for thousands of years.
We do not belong here.
this place with the sky too endless.
This place with the water too endless
This place with air too thick and heavy to breathe.
This place with the roll and roar of thunder always playing to your ears.
We are not ready to be here.
We are not prepared in the old way.
We have no medicine
We have not sat and had our minds walk through the image
of coming to this ocean.
We are not ready.
We have not put our minds to what it is we want to give to the ocean.
We do not have cornmeal. feathers, nor do we have songs and prayers ready.
We have not thought what gift we will ask from the ocean.
Should we ask to be song chasers
Should we ask to be rainmakers
Should we ask to be good runners
or should we ask to be heartbreakers.
No. we are not ready to be here at this ocean.
The Tohono O'odham, formerly known as the Papago numbers somewhere between 18,000 and 21,000, now 34,000. The people live in southern Arizona and northern Sonora. Mexico, residing primarily on three reservations: Wa:k. or San Xavier, near Tucson; the main reservation where the tribal agency is in the town of Sells. Arizona: and a third reservation near Gila Bend. Arizona. Many O'odham also live in or near the various border towns of Casa Grande, Ajo. Florence, and Eloy, and in rural communities such as Stanfield. Arizona. Others live in the major cities of Tucson and Phoenix.
By virtue of population and land, the Tohono O'odham tribe is significant in the United States. Its population and reservation size is second in the Southwest only to the Navajo nation. Because the Tohono O'odham is a desert tribe, however, it is not commonly known among non-Indians. Contemporary sociological and ethnographic information on the O'odham is available in a book by Bernard Fontana and John P. Schaefer. Of Earth and Little Rain (University of Arizona Press, 1990). A historical account is provided in Sharing the Desert: The Tohono O'odham in History by Winston Erickson (University of Arizona
Press. 1994).
June 18, 2022
This year, I'm re-cultivating a love of poems and poetry with a project to choose 1 poem each month to re-read every day. The idea is from this: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/17/ma...
A friend of mine from Tucson gave me this book for my project and suggested his favorite poem, O'Odham Dances, which he said smells like the Sonoran desert creosote just before it rains. Each day in May, often in the car with others as we returned from a hike in the desert wilderness with No More Deaths (https://nomoredeaths.org/en/), I read it and listened alongside to the O'Odham language words in Zepeda's voice accompanied by Sonoran birdsong and desert imagery on this video: https://vimeo.com/198077138
If you've lived in the Sonoran desert for even a few seasons, the images of weather patterns, sky shifts, scents, sounds, sights, skin feel that Zepeda evokes in O'Odham Dances and the rest of the book are-- I wouldn't say "moving" because no, they give you pause, make you look up, inhale, take note. She lays down in writing so much that is, for my few years here, experiential and rarely formed into words. What a power. Besides the ecosystem, Zepeda lovingly records stories and moments of O'Odham life over the last several decades. A beautiful book very rooted in place and people.
A friend of mine from Tucson gave me this book for my project and suggested his favorite poem, O'Odham Dances, which he said smells like the Sonoran desert creosote just before it rains. Each day in May, often in the car with others as we returned from a hike in the desert wilderness with No More Deaths (https://nomoredeaths.org/en/), I read it and listened alongside to the O'Odham language words in Zepeda's voice accompanied by Sonoran birdsong and desert imagery on this video: https://vimeo.com/198077138
If you've lived in the Sonoran desert for even a few seasons, the images of weather patterns, sky shifts, scents, sounds, sights, skin feel that Zepeda evokes in O'Odham Dances and the rest of the book are-- I wouldn't say "moving" because no, they give you pause, make you look up, inhale, take note. She lays down in writing so much that is, for my few years here, experiential and rarely formed into words. What a power. Besides the ecosystem, Zepeda lovingly records stories and moments of O'Odham life over the last several decades. A beautiful book very rooted in place and people.
June 30, 2022
Ofelia Zepeda's poems in Ocean Power celebrate the seasons and landscape of the Sonoran Desert home of her Tohono O'odham people. The last poem in the collection, from which it takes its title, captures the anxiety and uncertainty desert people experience in the face of the power of the ocean, for "We are not ready to be here" (p. 84).
Zepeda's poems instead express the bonds between her people and the desert land, which infuses matters as simple as hairstyle and as meaningful as how one buries one's mother. The prosody is simple and direct, although some of the poems are written in Tohono, and so impenetrable to non-native readers. (She does usually provide at least partial translations.)
Zepeda's work deserves to be better known. To academic eco-critics and ordinary lovers of the natural world her poetry speaks profoundly and beautifully.
Zepeda's poems instead express the bonds between her people and the desert land, which infuses matters as simple as hairstyle and as meaningful as how one buries one's mother. The prosody is simple and direct, although some of the poems are written in Tohono, and so impenetrable to non-native readers. (She does usually provide at least partial translations.)
Zepeda's work deserves to be better known. To academic eco-critics and ordinary lovers of the natural world her poetry speaks profoundly and beautifully.
September 23, 2018
This volume of work by the Tohono O'odham poet was published in
1995. Some of the poems use employ her native language which gives
them an authentic, calligraphic intensity. Try to sound out these ancient
words to add to the poem's pleasure. She is a Desert poet and the land
comes alive with her ceremonial work. Praise songs, harvest songs.
From the first poem "Pulling Down the Clouds" comes this encantatory
line: With my harvesting stick I will stir the clouds." Always waiting for
rain. Recommend.
1995. Some of the poems use employ her native language which gives
them an authentic, calligraphic intensity. Try to sound out these ancient
words to add to the poem's pleasure. She is a Desert poet and the land
comes alive with her ceremonial work. Praise songs, harvest songs.
From the first poem "Pulling Down the Clouds" comes this encantatory
line: With my harvesting stick I will stir the clouds." Always waiting for
rain. Recommend.
January 4, 2023
I don't like poetry. However! Something about this stands out, and if I had to take a guess it would be the way that the overarching format and inclusion of the O'odham language compliments each individual poem. Each poem tells a part of a story, which is probably what I dislike most about other forms of poetry.
September 1, 2023
This is the second collection of poetry I've read by Ofelia Zepeda, and I'm coming to a realization that her work is delightfully habit-forming. Fortunately she has been quite prolific, which means that I have the opportunity to continue to read her simple yet elegant poetry, teeming with desert life.
March 20, 2025
I started reading this while in the desert, and journeyed with it through rain and eventually to the ocean.
All poems here are important, and powerful, and a few changed me.
Specifically 'Black Clouds' and 'The South Corner' hit me at the perfect time I needed to read them.
Excited to move onto Zepeda's 'Where The Clouds Form'
All poems here are important, and powerful, and a few changed me.
Specifically 'Black Clouds' and 'The South Corner' hit me at the perfect time I needed to read them.
Excited to move onto Zepeda's 'Where The Clouds Form'
July 18, 2022
I'm a member of the Tohono O'odham Nation and these poems capture the rhythm of the people and the beauty of the desert. Read a poem or two a day, no need to rush through the book. I'll return to these again and again.
September 22, 2021
read for my Native literature class.
a beautiful collection of poetry. i don't read poetry because it is beyond me and it usually flies over my head. this one really got me deep.
a beautiful collection of poetry. i don't read poetry because it is beyond me and it usually flies over my head. this one really got me deep.
September 26, 2021
These poems are beautiful! I loved the way Zepeda wrote about the desert, water, and her and her family and tribes interactions with them. Especially poignant if you live in Southern Arizona.
August 23, 2016
What a wonderful collection of poetry that comes from the Tohono O'odham desert. Zepeda herself identifies with her Tohono O'odham culture, using her poetry to discuss matters of water in the desert--both in English and her native tongue. The pages are full of stories about how others experience rain in the desert, a commodity that many do not consider until they live in the desert. The poems are full of vibrant descriptions. At times you can taste the rain that the poet discusses. You can smell the rain as it begins to hit the warm desert dirt.
A great collection that gives subtle insights into American Indian culture in the desert. Many of the poems have an environmental criticism, often that desert outsiders do not appreciate the environment like those that live within the environment, but some poems are more critical than others on the subject. Vivid imagery throughout. Very captivating and it is easy to blaze through the entire book in about half an hour.
Several of the poems are entirely or partly in Tohono O'odham, which is beautiful to see on the page. I highly recommend Tucson natives visit Zepeda when she lectures at the University of Arizona campus (or anywhere, if you get the chance!) as her speaking voice is also phenomenal.
A great collection that gives subtle insights into American Indian culture in the desert. Many of the poems have an environmental criticism, often that desert outsiders do not appreciate the environment like those that live within the environment, but some poems are more critical than others on the subject. Vivid imagery throughout. Very captivating and it is easy to blaze through the entire book in about half an hour.
Several of the poems are entirely or partly in Tohono O'odham, which is beautiful to see on the page. I highly recommend Tucson natives visit Zepeda when she lectures at the University of Arizona campus (or anywhere, if you get the chance!) as her speaking voice is also phenomenal.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews