4
" Meditation on Wilderness
In the evening’s orange and umber light,
There comes vagrant ducks skidding on the pond.
Together they veer inward to the reeds.
The forest—aspen, oak, and pine—recedes,
And the sky is smudged on the ridge beyond.
There is more in my soul than in my sight.
I would move to the other side of sound;
I would be among the bears, keeping still,
Not watching, waiting instead. I would dream,
And in that old bewilderment would seem
Whole in a beyond of dreams, primal will
Drawn to the center of this dark surround.
The sacred here emerges and abides.
The day burns down, the hours dissolve in time;
The bears parade the deeper continent
As silences pervade the firmament,
And wind wavers on the radiant rime.
Here is the house where wilderness resides. "
― N. Scott Momaday , The Death of Sitting Bear: New and Selected Poems
6
" Yahweh to Urset
I pray that you are kept safe throughout this day, that
you live as wholly as you can, that you see things that
you have not seen before and that more of them are
beautiful than not, more of them delightful than not.
I pray that you hold easily in your hands the balance
of the earth and sky, that you laugh and cry, know
freedom and restraint, some joy and some sorrow,
pleasure and pain, much of life and a little of death.
I pray that you are grateful for the gift of your being,
and I pray that you celebrate your life in the proper
way, with grace and humility, wonder and contentment,
in the strong, deep current of your spirit’s voice. I pray
that you are happily in love with the dawn and that you
are more deeply in love in the dusk. "
― N. Scott Momaday , The Death of Sitting Bear: New and Selected Poems
9
" Lines for My Daughter
With reverence for the earth you venture
into vague margins of advancing rain
and behold crystals of the sailing sun.
The clouds weave ribbons of shade and eclipse,
rippling on the colors that compose you,
sand, sienna, jade, the speckled turquoise
of mountain skies. And in your supple mind
there are shaped the legends of creation,
and in them you appear as dawn appears,
beautiful in the whispers of the wind,
whole among the soft syllables of myth
and the rhythms of serpentine rivers.
Once more you venture. The long days darken
In the wake of your going, and thunder
Rolls, bearing you across a ridge of dreams.
I follow on the drifts of sweetgrass and smoke,
On a meadow path of pollen I walk,
And hold fast the great gift of your being. "
― N. Scott Momaday , The Death of Sitting Bear: New and Selected Poems
11
" Prairie Hymn:
On the tongue a hymnal of American names,
And the silence of falling snow—Glacier,
Bearpaw, Bitterroot, Wind River, Yellowstone.
I dreamed among the ice caps long ago,
Ranging with the sun on the inward slope,
Down the wheel of seasons and the solstices
To the tilted moon and cradle of the stars. T
here was the prairie, always reaching.
Time was sundered, and the light bore wonder.
The earth broke open and I held my breath.
In the far range of vision the prairie shone bright
As brit on the sea, crescive and undulant…
The range of dawn and dusk; the continent lay out
In prairie shades, in a vast carpet of color and light.
In the Sun Dance I was entranced, I drew in the smoke
Of ancient ice and sang of the wide ancestral land.
Rain-laden clouds ringed the horizon, and the hump-backed
Shape sauntered and turned. Mythic deity!
It became the animal representation of the sun, an
In the prairie wind there was summer in the spring. "
― N. Scott Momaday , The Death of Sitting Bear: New and Selected Poems
