Wisconsin’s former Poet Laureate Kim Blaeser leaves us with a benediction, calling out the sacred dimension of water.
Preamble
On White Earth Reservation in the northern Minnesota of my childhood, I grew up in rich water country. My family spent nearly every weekend of my early life fishing, swimming, skating, setting net, spearing, ice fishing, harvesting wild rice. We knew water as provider as well as the home of the great underwater panther, Mishibizhi. Water didn’t come from a faucet. We collected rain, pumped our drinking water from the belly of earth, or hauled it from springs in cream cans in the back of my uncle’s pickup.
Because water came through labour, we didn’t waste it. Because our life was linked to water, we knew it as a relative. Because stories told how the cycles of women and moon were tide driven, we understood Water’s power and its mythic truth.
A Song for Giving Back
The benediction of Water
begins in the holy whoosh whoosh
whoosh whoosh of womb sounds—
this ancient amniotic language
our first song.
Like the earth afloat in a great weeping cosmos,
we fetal beings suspended in sublime liquidity.
Yes, name Water the primary principle, sacred
originating material—
sing our aqueous blood belonging.
That the nature of all creatures is moist.
That everything is godfull and growing.
That all who hold with science or spirit
must hold also with change:
liquid to ice, ice to vapor—and back.
The benediction of Water
begins also with the whoosh whoosh of manoomin
the “food that grows on water,”
wild rice kernels falling into canoe bottoms—
into the muddy silt of becoming.
And no arid doctrine of ownership will serve
we river nymphs, minor but blessed beings
we swim if we swim at all in the flood, blood,
wine, baptism, and copper glistening resurrection
of water metaphors for our streaming lives.
Oh sweet sap of trees, oh fertile forest brine
forgive our parched longing and give it voice.
Rivers sing and we with them:
Miigwechiwi—daily make a song offering,
here flows our gratitude
In blue-scented drench of spring
Sing Spirit of Water
In narrow boats on swift flowing passageways
Sing Spirit of Water
When great lakes rush in and tides softly backstroke away
Sing Spirit of Water
As tears stutter from pain, pool and spill
Sing Spirit of Water
When the body’s fluids pulse and yearn
When the liquid vibration of voice rises upward to sky
When seeping in and seeping out meet
When the cup of eternity is full full
Of wet and holy, full full of gratitude
Sing Spirit of Water
Sing Spirit of Water
whoosh whoosh whoosh sing
Spirit of Water, whoosh.