Great Spirit of the God who is alive,
Whose risen Son I seek before the dawn,
Who makes the black and gold sunflower thrive,
The earthworm loosen soil beneath the lawn;
Great Spirit, grant my great-grandmother’s looks
Attend me while I rub her cherry hutch.
Great Spirit, grant my late grandfather’s books
Preserve his signature I love to touch.
Surround and show to me that massive cloud
Of witnesses—undauntable or docile.
Allow their countenances to enshroud
My shoulders, spoken of by Your Apostle.
Send generous Nunnehi to my steeple,
Returning me, at last, to my dark people.
From Indigenous: Poems, © 2019 Jennifer Reeser. Used by permission of Able Muse Press.
Note: Nunnehi are spirit people in Cherokee mythology. The Cherokee word has been translated as “The People Who Live Anywhere” or “The People Who Live Forever.”
Jennifer Reeser (born 1968) is a formalist poet of Anglo-Celtic and Native American descent. Her seven poetry collections are Strong Feather (2022), Indigenous (2019), Fleur-de-Lis (2016), The Lalaurie Horror (2013), Sonnets from the Dark Lady and Other Poems (2012), Winterproof (2005), and An Alabaster Flask (2003), and she is anthologized in Christian Poetry in America since 1940 (2022). In addition to writing original poems, she also translates poetry from Russian, French, and Cherokee. A member of the Cherokee Nation, she divides her time between Louisiana, where she was born and raised, and the Cherokee Reservation in Indian Country near Tahlequah, Oklahoma.
Art & Theology 
A perfect meditation for Western All Saints’!
“Great Spirit, grant my late grandfather’s books
Preserve his signature I love to touch.”
My paternal grandfather reposed two years before my birth but I feel that I know him through the many letters that he wrote to his children during his final years.
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Yes, I was thinking of All Saints’ Day, and how the memory of the ones who’ve gone before us is often activated by things they made or owned or loved. With my grandma, it’s the smell of black tea or the sight of one of her antique glass paperweights on my bookshelf. With my grandpa, it’s anytime I hear a corny Reader’s Digest joke. I like how the poet captures our predecessors’ spiritual presence in heaven, in the company of saints, as well as the tangible ways they continue to be present to us through sensible things on earth.
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