June 2016
Kimberly Blaeser
kblaeser@uwm.edu
kblaeser@uwm.edu
As poet, photographer, and professor (not to mention wife, mother, and sometimes activist), I spend my life in an endless balancing act. I am Wisconsin's Poet Laureate and will hold that post through 2016. My teaching is in Creative Writing, Native American Literature, and American Nature Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. My publications include three collections of poetry: Apprenticed to Justice, Absentee Indians and Other Poems, and Trailing You. I am also the author of the scholarly monograph Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition, and the editor of Stories Migrating Home: A Collection of Anishinaabe Prose and Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry. My current creative project features “Picto-Poems” and brings my nature and wildlife photography together with poetry to explore intersecting ideas about Native place, nature, preservation, and spiritual sustenance. For more information about my work, please visit www.kblaeser.org.
Seen in Season
Brown rabbit droppings,
hollow of hoof prints in mud—
these odd signs of spring.
Gelitan tadpoles
tail going going, sprout legs:
count one, two, three—frog!
Copper crane bodies
ride impossible stilt legs
across fields of June.
Along cabin road
clusters of ladyslippers
nod a pink welcome.
Tiny emerald
hum and glimmer of body—
wing waiver buzz gone.
Brown rabbit droppings,
hollow of hoof prints in mud—
these odd signs of spring.
Gelitan tadpoles
tail going going, sprout legs:
count one, two, three—frog!
Copper crane bodies
ride impossible stilt legs
across fields of June.
Along cabin road
clusters of ladyslippers
nod a pink welcome.
Tiny emerald
hum and glimmer of body—
wing waiver buzz gone.
©2015 Kimberly Blaeser