Lydia Cheshewalla | Prairie Seraubade
I.
I dreamt of the language of entanglement and pondered how we may learn to hold hands the way prairie roots hold the earth where I grew up, gently, but not without resolve.
II.
You are standing in a sea of golden grasses,
the wind is rippling across an endless prairie,
the wind is rippling across you.
You are the grass and the wind and the unbroken blue.
You are the warmth of the sun and the sweet whisper of spring calling forth life.
III.
Everything is in relationship with everything here, but I find this to be true of all things and all places.
Before the prairie was a woodland or a marsh, it was an ocean. How many times has this land been rearranged, reformed, renewed?
It is a question that I ask of my own body too - how many times have my particles been rearranged, reformed, renewed? How many parts compose me and from where did they arrive?
IV.
Even when standing in one place we are travelers.
Beautiful amalgamations driven by fire and blown-out stars—and speaking of stars—look up!
Above you the sky is shifting from wild blue yonder to something madder.
We can start to see the faint beams of light, the aubades of other lovers,
yet we are just beginning.
Here in the dark,
we are waiting for something to happen.
V.
I thought I dreamt of you
already standing in the place
where I was just arriving
in the shadow of the moon
where the celestial body
lies beneath the water hidden by tall grasses.
I thought I went to kiss you,
our mouths starting the ancient song.
Your lips moving over mine to teach me
the shapes of syllables as they come
into existence
or my lips parting yours
looking for the lost word
the one that sets the world on fire.
VI.
In the dark of night, flames move in long lines across the prairie landscape, appearing like the illuminated script of a half-forgotten language that our bodies still understand to mean,
"Live now, if you are living at all!"
There is tension here
& the death songs rise from the flames.
There is fear here
& the worry songs keep us up all night.
There is trust here
& the renewal songs wake up the seeds.
VII.
The seeds that have been sitting in the dark are finally certain,
"Something is happening."
There are seeds that rely on fire and smoke to germinate, just as there are seeds that require cold and moisture to germinate.
We give these processes special names like pyriscence, serotiny, and stratification,
but a seed cannot name what is happening to it,
it can only experience it⸺this great desire, this demand for life.
VIII.
The fire burns all night and there are many awakenings and many small deaths. The gilded sea of yesterday will spend one breath as ash, then burst forth again, tender and green—the sweet audacity of renewal.
IX.
The sun is rising, let's go home.
Notes:
Written while living in Omaha, 2021, after working on the Prairie Corridor project as part of the Greenways Crew with Lincoln Parks & Rec.
(“Prairie Seraubade” first published in All That You See As You Walk Along by Fortuna Press 2022.)
Image information:
I: Image created during Tallgrass Artist Residency on the prairie of Matfield Green, Kansas in collaboration with place, time, kin, and Jessica Price using a digital harinezumi. 2021
II: Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in Pawhuska, Oklahoma.
III: Love is a Place, a collaboration with place, time, and kin created at Lake Forest College in Illinois for the group exhibition from. 2022. Photographed by Tom Van Eynde.
IV: Oklahoma sunset over Osage county.
V: Outlines and image created under a full moon on the Salt Plains in Jet, Oklahoma. 2019.
VI: Prescribed burn on the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve at night. 2019
VII: What Kind of Love Aren’t You Looking For?, a collaboration with place, time, and kin created for The Center For Native Futures booth at EXPO Chicago, 2024.
VIII: The prairie of Matfield Green, Kansas. 2020.
IX: On The Roads to Home, a collaboration with place, time, and kin created for the inaugural exhibition at Center for Native Futures in Chicago, Illinois. 2024.
Lydia Cheshewalla is an Osage ephemeral artist from Oklahoma, living and working in motion throughout the Great Plains ecoregion. Through the creation of site-specific land art and ephemeral installations grounded in Indigenous land stewardship practices and kinship pedagogies, Lydia engages in multivocal conversations about place and relationship. Her work has been shown at Generator Space, the Union for Contemporary Art (Omaha, NE), Comfort Station, Harold Washington Library, EXPO Chicago, and the Center for Native Futures (Chicago, IL) among others. She is currently filling the bucket with water to see if it leaks and is often found standing in fields.