About Standing (in Kinship)

by Kimberly Blaeser

We all have the same little bones in our foot
twenty-six with funny names like navicular.
Together they build something strong—
our foot arch a pyramid holding us up.
The bones don’t get casts when they break.
We tape them—one phalange to its neighbor for support.
(Other things like sorrow work that way, too—
find healing in the leaning, the closeness.)
Our feet have one quarter of all the bones in our body.
Maybe we should give more honor to feet
and to all those tiny but blessed cogs in the world—
communities, the forgotten architecture of friendship.

From The Path to Kindness: Poems of Connection & Joy.
Originally published in Poetry Magazine.

This poem is included in the anthology The Path to Kindness, available for purchase online.

It’s fitting that such a seemingly “small” poem, pointing to the fact that we each share “the same little bones” in our feet, should also hold so much wisdom. Kimberly Blaeser’s intention, after all, is to find the ways that we are all alike, rather than what divides us. She reminds us that those twenty-six bones “don’t get casts when they break,” and instead are bound to each other in order to heal. Perhaps it’s no accident that we talk about “standing together” when we support one another, seek justice, or serve the same cause. The “tiny but blessed cogs,” as her last few lines suggest, will always keep repairing the world as they help us “find healing in the leaning, the closeness.” She shows us that both bodies and communities are built, cog by cog, and person by person, every small part doing its best to hold up the whole.

Invitation for Writing & Reflection: Think back to a time when you found “healing in the leaning, the closeness,” and reached out to others for help with a difficult situation. How did you manage to move beyond your isolation, and remember the “kinship” that allows us all to thrive?

ABOUT THE POET: Kimberly Blaeser

Kimberly Blaeser, past Wisconsin Poet Laureate, is the author of five poetry collections most recently Copper Yearning, Apprenticed to Justice, and the bi-lingual Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance. An Indigenous activist and environmentalist from White Earth Reservation, she also edited Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry. Her book Copper Yearning won the Edna Meudt Poetry Book Award and was named one of the best Native Books in 2019 by the Tribal College Journal. Her photographs, picto-poems, and ekphrastic pieces have been included in exhibits such as “Ancient Light” and “Visualizing Sovereignty.”   A Professor at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and MFA faculty for the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, Blaeser is founding director of the literary organization In-Na-Po—Indigenous Nations Poets. She lives in rural Wisconsin; and, for portions of each year, in a water-access cabin near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota. Additional information is available at kblaeser.org

POETRY SELECTION AND COMMENTARY BY JAMES CREWS

James Crews is the author of four collections of poetry: The Book of What Stays, Telling My Father, Bluebird, and Every Waking Moment. He is also the editor of two anthologies: Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection and How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, The Sun, and have been reprinted in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry and featured on Tracy K. Smith’s podcast, The Slowdown. James teaches at SUNY-Albany and lives with his husband in Vermont.

Thanks to hundreds of readers who have given donations big and small, Gwarlingo remains ad-free. Donors who give $50 become members. If you love Gwarlingo, please consider giving back.