To those we ask for harvest
our hands offer aseema—
song and the fragrant tobacco grains.
Now lift the silver blade
to silver birch,
there score a prayer path
to follow with shallow cut.
Pry the bark edge
a finger’s breadth
remembering giizis,
the hint of gold at dawn.
Then reach bare hand
deep in moist dark joining,
where slow separating
awakens musk. Scent
the layers of time, of memory—
ours, wiigwassi-mitig.
Birch harvest stories,
like family faces—overlap.
Where season follows season
we, always a mingle—
of years, entwined arms.
Brown now with tannin
elbow deep and chanting,
carefully brace the birch
move inch by kwe inch.
Oh thunderous crack,
Oh beauty!
Minotaagwad—
when tree delivers bark
to hands who love,
who work this way
with Anishinaabe-aking.
—
Kimberly Blaeser, past Wisconsin Poet Laureate and founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets, is the author of six poetry collections including Ancient Light. An enrolled member of White Earth Nation, Blaeser is an Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist, MFA faculty member at Institute of American Indian Arts, and Professor Emerita at UW–Milwaukee. Blaeser spends part of each year in a cabin near the BWCA wilderness following poems, photos, and river otters—sometimes all at once.
