See me young and strong again.
I see you as I first saw you,
Fresh and pure and beautiful.
In your soul you are greatly loved.
Let us be alive in our daughters.
Let us walk among the camps
And be at play in our hearts.
Jornada del muerto
It is a deep etching of the sun.
It must be regarded in penance,
In the perspective of suffering,
A burning away of green surfaces,
A cauldron white hot in the shimmer
Of mirage. Old men speak of it
With dreadful wonder and respect.
At night it cools in a blue surround
Of celestial light, the distant ridge
Recedes into the pallor of the stars,
And dawn is the blush of a blood orange.
The morning slants on rippled banks
Standing still in the glitter of ancient glass.
A rattlesnake slithers among the stones.
Octave
There have been broken promises, a few,
And semblances of innocence seen through.
And we have taught each other how to be
In circumstances of duplicity.
So we have done. Contrition be our state
And generosity our saving fate.
I wish us well and take your tender hand
As we approach an unfamiliar land.
Yellow the Land and Sere
Bone the mornings,
Crystal the noons.
Seldom do the rains come
Now that summer rises
From the fields. There are clouds
Above the mountains,
But they do not move or darken.
They take the shapes of fanciful things,
But they do not move or darken.
Rodents thirst and hide from the sun.
Yellow the land and sere.
The Window Through Which the Light of a Candle Glowed
The windows in the Russian village were framed in blue. I thought there must have been a great supply of blue paint thereabouts in the early 20th century, for the windows in other villages were framed in blue as well. Or perhaps the windows simply indicated the taste of a particular paint salesman or that of the local magistrate or of the magistrate’s wife. It scarcely matters. The point is, I was passing by the village on a late afternoon in winter. Snow was deep, and the houses and sheds and barns seemed huddled against the cold, and animals stood still here and there in an attitude of sheer endurance. Darkness was approaching, but for a few moments the village stood against a brilliant sunset, orange and red and magenta. It was a scene of intense beauty and transformation, not unlike a painting by Boris Chetkov. It was a study in evanescence. I paused to take it in, to catch my breath. Then, as the sky faded, there appeared in the foreground a window through which the light of a candle glowed. It was nearly ineffable in its rustic warmth and dignity. It was a barely visible icon to grace the invisible spirit.
Torrent
In the late afternoon
In the far end of the canyon
A storm arose. The summer sky
Curdled and piled, and the leaves
Of cottonwoods began to quake,
And there was a rush of the wind.
There came the near edge of darkness,
Then suddenly the drumming of rain
On the river. The burdened air hung
On the great faces of the canyon walls
And turned from ruddy and bone to
Ochre and slate, and then were lost
In a shroud of roiling mist. Brilliant
Bolts of lightning struck along the rims,
And thunder crashed and rolled.
The world was frightening and full of
Havoc, like the breaking of Creation.
Animals cringed in the fury of the false night
And could do nothing but endure, huddled in
Dread and the hold of unknowing.
At last the sky cracked open and the
Setting sun appeared, dropping amber crystals
On the needles of evergreens. There was
Then only the gathering of a clear dusk
And a silence on the ancient walls.
Reconciliation
We have no food for fighting.
We must drink the broth of bark
And say kind things to each other.
We must be peaceful. You must say
That I cut a fine figure among men,
And I must say that you are a
handsome woman.
In this way we shall drink bark broth
And pity those who have food
for fighting.
Let us sit now in the porch swing
And dangle our feet in thanksgiving.
A Mythology of Belief
Did not the king believe
In the reality of the stars?
Or were they merely points
And patterns of mystical illusion?
The evidence of being was compelling.
He could see them, after all, and
He could hear the silence of their pulse.
And was he not named for Arcturus,
The Guardian of the Great Bear?
Some of his relatives may indeed
Have settled among the stars.
Therefore the king must have believed
In their far, flickering existence,
And he must have borne in his mind
A grave mythology of belief.
Northern Dawn
Cold is general on the winter plain,
And an ice fog rises from the crusted snow.
In the village fires burn, and meat is roasting.
In the meeting house elders sit at the walls
And receive food in the season of hunger.
A file of men dance in the hold of trance
And cut their hunters’ eyes into the dim
Corners of the Arctic night.
A woodsman enters, rude and grizzled.
He is accustomed, and welcome is accorded.
It is said that he has passed into legend,
Borne by dogs and the glow of constellations.
Indeed his tenure was earned long ago
Along frozen rivers, in slanted crystal fields,
And in the density of dark woods.
Now that he has touched the rim of eternity,
He is at ease, and he nods and dreams.
His hermit soul resides on the outside,
And outside the spirit lights hover and hang.
In the recession of stars the northern dawn
Appears, and he names the wilderness.
He sings among the ravens and the wolves.
The Pilgrims
They go, and nothing succeeds them.
In the long distance they disappear,
and where they were there is only
vacancy, the distillation of loss.
In memoriam they walk to no destiny.
Theirs is the burden of pilgrimage.
Their crooked file is etched on planes
of ice, a trace ascending beyond time.
Babushka
1
The Russian woman
Of ancient soul;
In her nature discreet,
In her manner brusque.
She would be kind,
But nothing has prepared her.
She holds in her hard hands
The insistent pain that long ago
She placed among the first
Spring flowers at the Kremlin wall.
And now again she holds the pink
And white blossoms close
To her hollow breast
And whispers thanksgiving.
She lifts her closed eyes
To the March sun.
She has been broken
And mended many times.
W
ith her brush broom
She sweeps the walkways
In the Alexander Gardens,
In her heart are the few shards
Of a child’s voice, scattered;
Silently she speaks his name,
And as the daylight darkens
She forgets how to weep
And imagines cabbage soup
And the beat of a linnet’s wings.
2
Once she dreamed
Of windows glowing bright
In the great country houses,
Of dancing and laughter
And lilting conversation
That carried elegantly
In the treasure-filled rooms.
With only partial understanding
She kept the tinkling syllables
In the trove of her mind
As if they could not be heard again.
In her girlhood she dreamed,
And she grew old.
3
Time touches her brain,
And the everyday sight
Of the red Kremlin walls.
The walls become to her
Other than mysterious.
Even the great golden domes
Within are mere glitter, though
At infrequent moments
A dilution of pride and pretense
Moves in her blood, and
She labors on to some beyond
In which first flowers,
The whir of a bird’s wings,
And the March sun sustain her.
4
In the forenoon a mother
And her child stroll
In the Gardens. In its pram
The child wriggles and coos,
And the mother dotes.
She is prim and fashionable.
At the wall an army officer
Snaps instructions to young men
Who will execute precisely
The Changing of the Guard.
Across the way an old woman,
Bent and anonymous, swings
A brush broom methodically
back and forth.
A Woman Walking
Had she been poured
into a mold
she should break away
with this much will and grace.
The white sails rise
from the bay.
They seem still against the
motion of the waves.
She walks on the beach
holding a music in her mind.
The sun touches her, and
she regards the distant fog,
Then there is a dead fish.
It is foul and prehistoric.
The woman wishes
she did not know of it,
But in an instant
she had got it caught
behind her eyes, and
she walks quickly on.
Seams
The image:
Bees entering the swarm.
The convergence is obscure
As once I saw leaves
Taking hold of the wind
In connection so fine
As to be indivisible.
A hurried cloud,
The swarm shifts and drones,
Gathering density to itself.
The leaves spin and roll,
Edging the air,
And there comes among them
A precise confusion,
And to the margin of a wood
A transparency like rain.
Gamesmen
What happened to the men who ran
Over and through and all around?
Did they not finish who began
The game to which they were so bound?
How could they have withdrawn from sight?
I love them now as I did then.
They kept the field where might was right
And they were more than mortal men.
They imaged greatness to a child;
Let not their image be defiled.
Prairie Hymn
As my eyes search the prairie
I feel the summer in the spring.
—CHIPPEWA
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.
There 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, cresive and undulant.
Antelope bounded and magpies sliced the air.
In the middle distance grazed the dark eminence,
The bestial heft on cleft hooves, the horns hooked.
Oh, sacrificial victim, your heart is sacred!
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, and
In the prairie wind there was summer in the spring.
Acknowledgments
The following poems in this volume have been previously published in earlier collections by N. Scott Momaday. Grateful acknowledgment is given to the University of New Mexico Press for permission to reprint them.
“The Kiowa No-Face Doll,” “A Sloven,” “Division,” “Spectre,” “The Snow Mare,” “The Bone Strikers,” “A Silence Like Frost,” “Sobremesa,” and “Before an Old Painting of the Crucifixion” from Again the Far Morning © 2013 by N. Scott Momaday. Used with permission of the University of New Mexico Press.
“The Great Fillmore Street Buffalo Drive,” “Nous avons vu la mer,” “On the Cause of a Homely Death,” “The Bear,” and “Angle of Geese,” and extract from “In the Colors of the Night” from In the Presence of the Sun © 2009 by N. Scott Momaday. Used with permission of the University of New Mexico Press.
“Yahweh to Urset,” “To an Aged Bear,” “Prayer for Words,” “The Blind Astrologers,” “Revenant,” and “Meditation on Wilderness” from In the Bear’s House © 2010 by N. Scott Momaday. Used with permission of the University of New Mexico Press.
About the Author
N. SCOTT MOMADAY is a poet, Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, playwright, painter, photographer, storyteller, and professor of English and American literature. Born in Lawton, Oklahoma, in 1934, Navarre Scott Momaday was raised in Indian country in Oklahoma and the Southwest. A member of the Kiowa tribe, his works celebrate Native American culture and the oral tradition. He is a graduate of the University of New Mexico (BA, 1958) and Stanford University (MA, 1960; PhD 1963), and has held tenured appointments at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Berkeley; and Stanford University; and retired as Regents professor at the University of Arizona. He also served as adjunct professor of Native American studies at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and as artist-in-residence at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Momaday holds twenty-one honorary doctoral degrees from American and European colleges and universities, and is the recipient of numerous awards and honors in recognition of the work he has done to celebrate and preserve Native American heritage and traditions. These include a National Medal of Arts, the Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award, the Ken Burns American Heritage Prize, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award. He has also served as Centennial Poet Laureate of the state of Oklahoma and holds the honor o
f Poet Laureate of the Kiowa tribe. He lives in New Mexico.
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Also by N. Scott Momaday
Poetry
Again the Far Morning: New and Selected Poems
In the Presence of the Sun: Stories and Poems, 1961–1991
The Gourd Dancer
Angle of Geese and Other Poems
Other Works
Three Plays: The Indolent Boys, Children of the Sun, and The Moon in Two Windows
Four Arrows & Magpie: A Kiowa Story
In the Bear’s House
The Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passages
Circle of Wonder: A Native American Christmas Story
The Ancient Child
The Names: A Memoir
The Way to Rainy Mountain
House Made of Dawn
The Journey of Tai-Me
Copyright
THE DEATH OF SITTING BEAR: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS. Copyright © 2020 by N. Scott Momaday. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Excerpt from the poem “Esse” by Czeslaw Milosz from Selected and Last Poems: 1931–2004 by Czeslaw Milosz.
Copyright © 1988, 1991, 1995, 2001, 2004, 2006 by The Czeslaw Milosz Estate. Courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers.
All artwork by N. Scott Momaday
Cover design by Andrea Guinn
Cover painting by N. Scott Momaday
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Momaday, N. Scott, 1934– author.
Title: The death of sitting bear : new and selected poems / N. Scott Momaday.
The Death of Sitting Bear Page 7
