Spirits of Spring
To hold the fire and the deep music, inside your heart through an icy freeze
She reminds me each melting season, that she did
In the spirit of spring, my grandmother kept those seeds in places I would find
To hold the knowledge and beauty keeping truth in seeds quiet
She held me a dark child through a deep winter, a relation to her husband’s secret soil
To come later and find those seeds along the ground
Sprouting
She left her paints
She left her garden
She left her spirit
She left her words
She left her music
She left her son
She left her secrets
And I would find each one
Her paints I ignited on trees of fibrous flesh
Her garden I planted in sweet new soils to blossom again
Her spirit lives on, in the seeds I water, inside my heart of giving
Her words were clues I glued together in a poem
Her music I remember on keyboards and harmonicas
Her son found us, our family, his ancestry, my garden, my roots,
Those seeds a secret hiding waiting to be watered
And yet she held it so complete, like the faith completed in a raindrop
Every birth of every seed, becoming every blossom, back into every seed
Each cloud and every bird and butterfly spreading her words
Knows this power, inside the seed of promise
She was the secret strength in how I see myself
I am her spring grandchild waiting behind on her path
Growing her visions Anishinabek of ‘the good people’
Opening each hidden thing of beauty
She taught me generosity of giving deeply, in the nurturing ways of a woman
Truth as love in one forgiveness strawberry
She was the strawberry sweetness of the heart ways of hiding
For she always kept her treasures well hidden
She suffered in her silence for all that she hid
And she gave in her silence for all that she mourned in her hiding
I will love you in the forever you taught me of the sky of my ancestors
That they are the stars looking out after me, hiding but still strong.
LauraLee K. Harris
Spirits of Spring ~ Igniting Seeds 48 x 48 ", Acrylic on Spruce with Beads