Poems by ​Jessie Kleemann 

​1.
 
The Path
between the thinning of straws
in the molden rocks the flowers of heavenly realms of
Spirits
 
Come down go up and beyond My father’s veins
the bones and life’s death
carrying our ancestors’ hunting game
in the flashes of lightning snow
water
and meteorites calling
 
Oceans ice
thickening blood
of golden rocks
my sled’s home
the path dissolves
 
time’s horizon in the news
the thinning sight of space
 
 
 
I go
I leave behind
my mother’s beaded costume
and the kamiks
in the dreary rain
of molden chains
 
 

 
2.
 
Weaving the embroidered knowledge
of my beaded collar
my mother’s tales scripting the cloth
cleansing the ways
 
and
the floors of the gateways of spirits
repeating the patterns
 
strokes of hardships in the lights
white out
 
sign languages unspoken told throughout
the whispers of dirt
 
touch me tear me down
catch me drop me
pull me together
in a dress of Love
knowledge unwinding
the threads
 
 
of sinews gone

 

​Jessie Kleemann was born in 1959 in Upernavik, Greenland. A performance artist and poet, she trained as a printmaker in Nuuk, Greenland, at the former Grafisk Værksted (now known as the Art School), and as an actress at the Tuukaq Theatre in Denmark. She has created videoworks, installations and live performances as well as worked in traditional theatre productions in Greenland. From 1984 – 1991 she was the head of the Art School in Nuuk. She has participated in numerous international poetry and literature festivals and worked with an international performance group The Wolf In The Winter. Artist monography Jessie Kleemann - Qivittoq was published in 2012. In her performance practices, she uses both gaze and bodily expressions to explore the various discourses of ethnocentricity marked upon Greenlandic Inuk women that could be regarded as the stigmatization of the female other.

---

---