Poems can take you into other worlds. At other times, they can take you deep into your own world. Gordon Henry, Jr., a professor at Michigan State University, is an Anishinaabe of the White Earth Nation in Northwest Minnesota. A little further east, my mother grew up. She told me of other Ojibwe who would come to their door, and my grandmother would give them food.
His first published poem Sleeping in the Rain, includes a woman “somewhere past ninety now; . . . She lives in a room. A taken care of world.” And I thought of my mom, when she was past ninety, in her taken care of room. Then in Part V of that poem, I was taken to her mother, another woman who lived past ninety. She cooked on a woodstove. In the next room, as I remember it, was gas stove to heat the home, though I suspect, it too was a woodburning stove when my mom and her brothers and sisters grew up there.
Great Gray Owl, Sax-Zim Bog, Minnesota
. . .
The old woman dreams she is up north, on the reservation. It is autumn. Pine smoke hanging over the tops of houses, leaves sleepwalking in gray wind, skeletal trees scratching ghost gray sky.
Bear Head Lake State Park, Minnesota
She is in the old black shack. At home. Stirring stew in the kitchen. The woodstove snaps in the next room.
A tiny room between the kitchen and the front stairs held the wood box where the chopped wood was stored. A window in the kitchen looked toward the garden, out buildings, and in the distance, the mine my grandfather worked in. I suspect from that window you could hear and watch my grandfather and uncles chopping the wood that heated the house and fed the stove that fed them.
Soudan, Minnesota
Out the window, he lifts the axe. He is young. She watches as it splits a log on the tree stump. He turns away and starts toward the house.
My uncle had a painting made of my grandmother from a photo he had taken. It hangs on the wall above the stairs. Last week, I held my granddaughter and showed her the picture of my grandmother.
Me, Grandma, Mom, Grandpa - below the kitchen window
He is old. He takes out his pipe and presses down tobacco. She goes to the door to meet him. She opens the door. She tries to touch him. He passes through her, like a cold shiver, and walks into a photograph on the wall.
From, Sleeping in the Rain, Gordon Henry, Jr.
You can hear him read the entire poem here: MSU Libraries’ Michigan Writers Series
Yellow Medicine River, Minnesota