Poetry Month - Heid E. Erdrich

Heid E. Erdrich is the author of seven collections of poetry. Her writing has won fellowships and awards from the National Poetry Series, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, McKnight Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, Bush Foundation, Loft Literary Center, First People’s Fund, and other honors.

Erdrich has twice won a Minnesota Book Award for poetry. Heid edited the 2018 anthology New Poets of Native Nations from Graywolf Press. Her latest poetry collection is Little Big Bully. Heid grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota and is Ojibwe enrolled at Turtle Mountain.

Hear more episodes for Poetry Month

Read along with the poems below as you listen to the episode:

Wild Turkey

Not the bottle
Not the burn on the lips
lit throat glow
Not even wild    really
but a small-town bird
whose burgundy throat
shimmers like nothing ever
A huge bird   impressive
who lurches and stalks me
window to window in this
desert retreat
What does he want?
Clearly he is lonely
pecks his reﬂection
and speaks to it in a low gubble
(not gobble) gubbles so tenderly
Soon as I think of him    his eye hits on me
We have watched each other for days
His shifting colors fascinate me his territorial strut
But it is his bald and blue-red head
his old man habits and gait that move me
If I even think of him    I taste whiskey
Drunk on solitude    I’d talk to anybody
I try his language on my lips
His keen response burns    like shame

Flickers

Abandoned town on the border, I wait
in tedious drilling noise. Flickers,
my sister birds, try a hole. Grub-full
and greedy, they ignore me. Fine, I say,
just fine. When have those birds ever

waited for me? What's in that hole for me?
It is hot while I stalk Flickers for feathers—
red and yellow shafts I mean to collect
for prayer fans. Hen-bodied, they would plummet

so easily. It's a pity they act so disappointed in love.
They make their mates sob sad wet notes that move
them to nest in dead wood. I watch, my gaze still, hot.

Ah! Their wings burn right past me.
One eyes me: the sun in a crushing black rock.
She blots me bone dry, sends me dreaming
through a red and yellow thirst—
this prayer they will teach me.

DNA Tribes

The red-eyed vireo calls:
Here I am. Where are you?

Like some bizarre bio-mimic,
web ads pop up while I email

asking: Native American DNA—
What tribe are you?

All's I’d need to do is swab
and mail away

cells my ancestors took
millennia to perfect.

And who owns them then?

Here I am. Where are you?
The red-eyed vireo calls,

misleading us to relocate,
following its flight

away from nestlings tight in twigs,
to get us lost in a bog,

asking all along if we even
know our own locale:

Here I am. Where are you?

Native American DNA—
What Tribe are you?

As if that could fool us,
make us forget the nesting grounds,

the red eye cast ever backward
to a place always known as home.