On the eve of President's Day

The day night after tomorrow's brings February's full moon. According to some reports it will be the biggest, brightest moon (supermoon) for several years to come. Some Anishnaabe refer to it as sucker moon (namebini-giizis). Others refer to February's full moon as bear moon (MKWA GIIZIS) and call April's full moon the sucker moon. Regardless of the name, we're looking forward to seeing it and maybe getting a picture or two if the sky is clear enough.

a February full moon

Photo by J. Harrington

Suckers, the fish, run in April, not February. Black bears give birth to cubs in February. There's a partial explanation of the differencese in naming moons among the Ojibwe to be found on the ojibwe.net months and moons page. Thinking about suckers running makes us think about open water running. We haven't been to any of the feeder streams flowing to the St. Croix River for months and months. Tomorrow is a holiday. A trip to look at and listen to open, running, water, followed by a cup of coffee at a local coffee shop, seems like a great way to honor the first 44 presidents of the country. Number 45 seems hell-bent to destroy whatever good is left in this nation, so we'll leave him off a list of those we honor tomorrow. As of today, it is 624 days until the next presidential election.

open water, running water, sucker water?

Photo by J. Harrington

A New National Anthem

Ada Limón, 1976

The truth is, I’ve never cared for the National
Anthem. If you think about it, it’s not a good
song. Too high for most of us with “the rockets’
red glare” and then there are the bombs.
(Always, always there is war and bombs.)
Once, I sang it at homecoming and threw
even the tenacious high school band off key.
But the song didn’t mean anything, just a call
to the field, something to get through before
the pummeling of youth. And what of the stanzas
we never sing, the third that mentions “no refuge
could save the hireling and the slave”? Perhaps
the truth is that every song of this country
has an unsung third stanza, something brutal
snaking underneath us as we blindly sing
the high notes with a beer sloshing in the stands
hoping our team wins. Don’t get me wrong, I do
like the flag, how it undulates in the wind
like water, elemental, and best when it’s humbled,
brought to its knees, clung to by someone who
has lost everything, when it’s not a weapon,
when it flickers, when it folds up so perfectly
you can keep it until it’s needed, until you can
love it again, until the song in your mouth feels
like sustenance, a song where the notes are sung
by even the ageless woods, the shortgrass plains,
the Red River Gorge, the fistful of land left
unpoisoned, that song that’s our birthright,
that’s sung in silence when it’s too hard to go on,
that sounds like someone’s rough fingers weaving
into another’s, that sounds like a match being lit
in an endless cave, the song that says my bones
are your bones, and your bones are my bones,
and isn’t that enough?

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