The ancestors live in boxes now. I live squared—only head. The world is blue screen, is scream.Name something intact—without acronyms.Morning cormorant a silhouette—elongatedin familiar, a routine of hunger then bulk.We swallow whole the impossible. No onefeeds prettily. Avert your eyes, survive.The ancestors live in white—cardboard boxes.I am fasting. No news feed. Or rumor. Politicsa super spreader. How we shelter in non-places.Here the hooked bill of the cormorant fills(I ignore the chat, have exited the zoom room).My dry throat opens—to swallow, convulsesby reflex or instinct. Waterbirds, we live this story.Ancestors wait on shelves in numbered boxes.They dive, propel themselves with webbed feet.Shaggy cormorant wings spread wide to dry.Perhaps we are not praying when we lift our hands.
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“Taxonomy” from Ancient Light: Poems © 2024 by Kimberly Blaeser. Reprinted by permission of the University of Arizona Press
John Fisher
Kimberly Blaeser, past Wisconsin Poet Laureate and founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets is the author of six poetry collections including Ancient Light, Copper Yearning, and Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance. Her photographs and picto-poems have appeared in exhibits such as “Visualizing Sovereignty” and “No More Stolen Sisters.” An enrolled member of White Earth Nation, Blaeser is an Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist whose accolades include a Poets and Writers’ Writer for Writers Award and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas. She is an MFA faculty member at Institute of American Indian Arts and Professor Emerita at UW–Milwaukee.
Tucson, Arizona
University of Arizona
“‘Loss is a sentry, a watching,’ writes Kimberly Blaeser in her latest collection of poems, Ancient Light. Emerging from the stillness and despair of a global pandemic, Blaeser’s poems are elegiac, and they are wondrous elevations of a distinctly Anishinaabe world—a homescape in which humans and their stories are in kinship with the land. Blaeser’s poems praise the legacies of ‘antler earrings’ and ‘ruby star quilt[s]’; they follow the heron’s arc of flight and the bounty of a tamarack woods. In a time most are lost, Blaeser’s poems give us small rushes of direction like ‘inky leaf shadows on snow.’”
—Molly McGlennen, author of Our Bearings
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