Ozaagi’aan One Open to an Other
Gizaagi’in apii zaagi’idizoyan
I love you when you love yourself
gaye gaawiin zaagi’idizosiiyan
and when you do not
apii zaagijiba’iweyang
when we escape together
gaye zaagijinizhikawangwaa
and when we chase together
wiindigoog wiindamoonangwaa
the demons who tell us
gaawiin zaagiginzinog ozaagiing
nothing sprouts at the inlet
aanawi gikendamang jiigi-zaaga’igan
when we know at the edge of the lake
gii-zaagida’aawangweyang ingoding
where ashes were poured
zaagaakominagaanzh zaagaagoneg
the bearberry stands in the snow
zaagidikwanaaging ezhi-nisidotamang
branches reaching and tracing
zaagijiwebinamang gaye ishkonamang
what we have tossed and what we have saved
ezhi-naagadawaabandamang
as we examine
gizaagi’in, gizaagi miidash ozaagi’aan.
love.
Copyright © 2020 by Margaret Noodin. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 2, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I wrote this poem after conversations with my daughters, my own true love, and a group of women at Trent University in Ontario who asked Shirley Williams and I how to talk about love between cis-gender, queer, gay, lesbian and trans people. We struggled to give them precise words for those binary concepts and offered instead the concept of ‘zaagi-’ which is a morpheme meaning ‘open’ or ‘outward’ and one of the words used to translate the English word ‘love’ into Ojibwe. My poem is really two poems layered together with the meaning overlapping in a way that is almost the same but never precisely an echo of rhythm and content. In my dreams readers know both Ojibwe and English fluently and delight in the sleight of hand used to be a poet in both languages. For now, until there are more readers of Ojibwe, it is a bridge between worlds, one where love is centered by gender and one where the sighing sound of ‘zaagi’ is an invitation to any Other who accepts it.”
—Margaret Noodin
Margaret Noodin
Margaret Noodin is the author of Gijigijigaaneshi Gikendaan (Wayne State University Press, 2020) and Weweni (Wayne State University Press, 2015), both collections of bilingual poems in Anishinaabemowin and English, and Bawaajimo: A Dialect of Dreams in Anishinaabe Language and Literature (Michigan State University Press, 2014).