by Lynne Friedman
Wild Grains Far North
for Francee Silverman
The Ojibwe know the place where the food grows on the water
gathered during the wild rice making moon
Before the Mississippi starts
Where the Mississippi is unformed in
the great fresh sea
of water and sky and tufts of land
where the lakes are bigger than Hibbing or Bemidji and the sky
turns black with cold.
When you grew out of that infant River into the City, the voice
of tallgrass and North wind could never leave you
even in Minneapolis, in Boulder, in Santa Fe.
Always the voice inside you sang of migrating birds
and spaces that sustained them
grasslands flyways
rivers lakes
grains
Some people take their inner song
from the deepest muck of the end of the Mississippi
where salt and oil mix freely in its mouth.
But you – You were of the Land made from sky and water –
the fall and the migrations
of the sand hill cranes – like the men who followed you
who could never understand –
you were as straightforward as
the beginning of the Mississippi
in your subterranean flows and your cut off oxbows
and your impulse onward – unstopped ferocity.
I looked online before calling. I got your obituary
instead of your newest, best-ever feats.
You – unstoppable – are now untouchable.
Unreachable except by letter –
but which one?
I know the Hebrew alphabet
contains the sacred within each sound.
If I look, maybe I can find you there –
you may be in the dots of the “pointed text” – the nikkudim.
So subtle – like rice grains
and the cranes high in the air.
Katherine Leonard grew up as a post-WWII Navy brat traveling to Massachusetts at the time of John F. Kennedy’s assassination and experienced the segregation of rural Texas at the time of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. She continued the pursuit of diverse outlooks with careers as a chemist, a geologist and an oncology nurse/nurse practitioner. Her writing has been deeply influenced by time spent in New Mexico, Texas and Colorado for space and heat and Vermont and Maine for ice and clarity and by living in Washington, DC for lies and redemption. She currently lives and writes in the Central New York area and is actively involved in the YMCA’s Downtown Writers Center. Her work has been previously published in Healing Muse, Sonora Review, Writers Café Fairy Tale Edition, Underwood Press True Chili Edition, Northern New England Review, Hole in the Head Review, Literary North and Speckled Trout Review.
Lynne Friedman’s work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Booth Western Art Museum (GA), Galleria Nacional (Costa Rica), the James McNeil Whistler Museum and numerous solo shows in New York City including Noho Gallery and Prince Street Gallery among others in the Chelsea District of NYC. Additionally her work was selected for the U.S. Department of State Art-in-Embassies Program for Djibouti, E. Africa and Colombo, Sri Lanka. Her work is in many corporate and private collections including Pfizer, McGraw Hill, IBM, Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, Pace University, Ritz Carleton Hotels and City National Bank. She has received seven artist residency grants to work in Spain, Costa Rica, Ireland, Southern France and New Mexico. She received a BA and MFA in Art from Queens College, an Ed.D. from Columbia University and studied at the New York Studio School. Previously a college art teacher she now works full time painting.