JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
A 70-year-old poet and environmentalist is being honored by the National Book Foundation for her work bringing together science and literature. NPR's Neda Ulaby has more.
NEDA ULABY, BYLINE: Kimberly Blaeser grew up in the White Earth Nation. That's Minnesota's largest reservation. Her people, the Anishinaabe, she says, see science and spirituality as intertwined, like in this poem she read for NPR.
KIMBERLY BLAESER: (Reading) "About Standing (In Kinship)" - we all have the same little bones in our foot, 26 with funny names like navicular. Together, they build something strong, our foot arch, a pyramid holding us up. These 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.
ULABY: When Blaeser wrote that poem, it was during the pandemic. She was in rural Minnesota. George Floyd had just died. It was President Trump's first term, and there were protests everywhere.
BLAESER: And it seems like the poem has come back to mean the same thing for me again, especially because of what's happening in Minneapolis, and I have relatives and other dear ones there who are just right there in the fray.
ULABY: Her poem about bones in our feet is, she says, for them.
BLAESER: 'Cause we stand up, you know? Like, we do have to stand up for whatever is needing to be protected or fought for, but if we do it and when we do it in kinship, that's where we find the strength and the peace.
ULABY: Kimberly Blaeser, a former Poet Laureate of Wisconsin, will be in New York next month to accept a prize from the National Book Foundation for her most recent collection of poems. It's called "Ancient Light." Neda Ulaby, NPR News.
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