Today’s title borrows from Wes Jackson. Today is International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples. Yesterday, the voters in Ohio chose self-determination, for women and men, over autocracy. Kimberly Blaeser seems to have anticipated such a combination of events in a poem she wrote several years ago. Her words exceed any ability of mine to honor those who must continue the battles to control their own bodies and lands. (Some years back I had the pleasure of participating in a poetry class she taught at the Aldo Leopold Foundation.)
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| American Indian Cultural Corridor, Minneapollis
Photo by J. Harrington
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A Quest for Universal Suffrage
I.
Suffrage:
In late middle English
intercessory prayers,
a series of petitions.
Not the right—but the hope.
Universal:
applicable to all cases—
except those marginalized
and unnamed.
A belief, but not a fact.
II.
In the trombone slide of history
I hear the suffer in suffragette
the uni uni uni in universal—
each excluded ikwe: women
from five hundred tribal nations
mindimooyenh or matriarchs
of ancient flourishing cultures
still disenfranchised by race,
still holding our world together
in the dusky and lawless violence
manifest in colonial america.
Twenty-six million american women
at last granted the right to vote.
Oh, marginal notes in the sweet anthem
of equality, Indigenous non-citizens
turn to the older congress of the sun
seek in the assembled stories of sky
a steady enlightenment—natural laws
(the mathematics of bending trees,
sistering of nutrients—maizebeanssquash,
or wintering wisdom of animal relatives)
each seasonal chorus colored with resilience—
earth voices rising in sacred dream songs.
Even now listen, put on the moon-scored
shell of turtle, wear this ancient armour
of belonging. In the spiral of survivance
again harvest the amber sap of trees
follow the scattered path of manoomin
the wild and good seed that grows on water.
Oh water, oh rice, oh women of birch dreams
and baskets, gather. Here reap and reseed
raise brown hands trembling holy with endurance.
Now bead land knowledge into muklaks
sign with the treaty X of exclusion.
Kiss with fingers and lips the inherited
woodland flutes and breathy cedar songs.
Say yea, eya, and yes. Here and here cast
your tended nets—oh suffered and sweetly mended
nets of abundance. This year and each to follow
choose, not by paper but by pathway, a legacy:
woman’s work—our ageless ballad of continuance.
Copyright © 2020 Kimberly Blaeser. This poem was co-commissioned by the Academy of American Poets and the New York Philharmonic as part of the Project 19 initiative.
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