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Again the Far Morning: New and Selected Poems
Although highly regarded as a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and drama, N. Scott Momaday considers himself primarily a poet. This first book of his poems to be published in over a decade, Again the Far Morning comprises a varied selection of new work along with the best from his four earlier books of Angle of Geese (1974), The Gourd Dancer (1976), In the Presence of the Sun (1992), and In the Bear's House (1999). To read Momaday's poems from the last forty years is to understand that his focus on Kiowa traditions and other American Indian myths is further evidence of his spectacular formal accomplishments. His early syllabic verse, his sonnets, and his mastery of iambic pentameter are echoed in more recent work, and prose poetry has been part of his oeuvre from the beginning. The new work includes the elegies and meditations on mortality that we expect from a writer whose career has been as long as Momaday's, but it also includes light verse and sprightly translations of Kiowa songs.
- GenresPoetry
150 pages, Hardcover
First published April 15, 2011
13 people are currently reading
96 people want to read
About the author
N. Scott Momaday
72 books576 followersN. Scott Momaday's baritone voice booms from any stage. The listener, whether at the United Nations in New York City or next to the radio at home, is transported through time, known as 'kairos"and space to Oklahoma near Carnegie, to the "sacred, red earth" of Momaday's tribe.
Born Feb. 27, 1934, Momaday's most famous book remains 1969's House Made of Dawn, the story of a Pueblo boy torn between the modern and traditional worlds, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize and was honored by his tribe. He is a member of the Kiowa Gourd Dance Society. He is also a Regents Professor of Humanities at the University of Arizona, and has published other novels, memoir, plays and poetry. He's been called the dean of American Indian writers, and he has influenced other contemporary Native American writers from Paula Gunn Allen to Louise Erdrich.
Momaday views his writings, published in various books over the years, as one continuous story. Influences on his writing include literature of America and Europe and the stories of the Kiowa and other tribal peoples.
"Native Americans have a unique identity," Momaday told Native Peoples Magazine in 1998. "It was acquired over many thousands of years, and it is the most valuable thing they have. It is their essence and it must not be lost."
Momaday founded The Buffalo Trust in the 1990s to keep the conversations about Native American traditions going. He especially wanted to give Native American children the chance to getting to know elders, and he wanted the elders to teach the children the little details of their lives that make them uniquely Native American. Once the Buffalo Trust arranged for Pueblo children to have lesson from their elders in washing their hair with yucca root as their ancestors did for as long as anyone can remember.
"In the oral tradition," Momaday has said, "stories are not told merely to entertain or instruct. They are told to be believed. Stories are realities lived and believed."
Born Feb. 27, 1934, Momaday's most famous book remains 1969's House Made of Dawn, the story of a Pueblo boy torn between the modern and traditional worlds, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize and was honored by his tribe. He is a member of the Kiowa Gourd Dance Society. He is also a Regents Professor of Humanities at the University of Arizona, and has published other novels, memoir, plays and poetry. He's been called the dean of American Indian writers, and he has influenced other contemporary Native American writers from Paula Gunn Allen to Louise Erdrich.
Momaday views his writings, published in various books over the years, as one continuous story. Influences on his writing include literature of America and Europe and the stories of the Kiowa and other tribal peoples.
"Native Americans have a unique identity," Momaday told Native Peoples Magazine in 1998. "It was acquired over many thousands of years, and it is the most valuable thing they have. It is their essence and it must not be lost."
Momaday founded The Buffalo Trust in the 1990s to keep the conversations about Native American traditions going. He especially wanted to give Native American children the chance to getting to know elders, and he wanted the elders to teach the children the little details of their lives that make them uniquely Native American. Once the Buffalo Trust arranged for Pueblo children to have lesson from their elders in washing their hair with yucca root as their ancestors did for as long as anyone can remember.
"In the oral tradition," Momaday has said, "stories are not told merely to entertain or instruct. They are told to be believed. Stories are realities lived and believed."
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 2, 2024
We Have Seen the Animals Lascaux
For we have seen the animals That linger in primordial dark, Parade in step and intervals That mark millennia, an arc Of time beyond the reckoning. Whose hand has traced these living lines? Whose mind has ventured past the thing That mere mortality confines? Horse, bison, auroch, bear, and deer, Convene forever in the night, Their ghosts, in old communion here, Emerge in stark, forgotten light.
Or has their spirit thrived unseen, Bled into earth and rock?— In attitudes austere, serene, Evincing myth, story, epoch.
This felt like such a blessing to read after the passing of the author, a day I deeply mourned for the loss to the world of such a singular, beautiful mind, and because I don’t know what his people believed about death so I could properly mourn or not mourn. I imagine it doesn’t matter, and I think he would forgive me and say, I speak from my heart from my tradition, you do the same. And from my heart, I cherish the image of him standing in a cave in France, the Old Country, the origin of the nightmare that befell this continent, and marvelling at the communion of those early humans and I think he has joined the eternal “convening,” the wisest of souls to walk this earth, and I pay respect and thanks to the earth that I strive to keep as he taught us.
We are told that writing is about six thousand years old. The oral tradition is inestimably older, as old as language itself.
My principal objective as a poet is to write directly from my mind and heart in the traditions that are my heritage. To trade in the wonder of words and to be acquainted with those whose best expressions have sustained us, that is literature. —N.
Earth and I Gave You Turquoise
Earth and I gave you turquoise
When you walked singing
Low light upon the rim; a wind informs
This distance with a gathering of storms
And drifts in silver crescents on the grass,
Configurations that appear, and pass.
Headwaters
Noon in the intermountain plain:
There is scant telling of the marsh—
A log, hollow and weather-stained,
An insect at the mouth, and moss—
Yet waters rise against the roots,
Stand brimming to the stalks. What moves?
What moves on this archaic force
Was wild and welling at the source.
The Colors of Night
1. WHITE An old man’s son was killed far away in the Staked Plains. When the old man heard of it he went there and gathered up the bones. Thereafter, wherever the old man ventured, he led a dark hunting horse which bore the bones of his son on its back. And the old man said to whomever he saw: “You see how it is that now my son consists in his bones, that his bones are polished and so gleam like glass in the light of the sun and moon, that he is very beautiful.”
The Monoliths
The wind lay upon me.
The monoliths were there
In the long light, standing
Cleanly apart from time.
The Gourd Dancer
Another season centers on this place.
Like memory the sun recedes in time
Into the hazy, southern distances.
And owl ascends
Among the branches, clattering, remote
Within its motion, intricate with age.
Dancing,
He dreams, he dreams— The long wind glances, moves
Forever as a music to the mind; The gourds are flashes of the sun.
Crows in a Winter Composition
This morning the snow,
The soft distances
Beyond the trees
In which nothing appeared—
Nothing appeared. The several silences,
Imposed one upon another,
Were unintelligible.
on the farther rim the grasses flicker and blur, a hawk brushes rain across the dusk, meadows recede into mountains, and here and there are moons like salmonberries upon the glacial face of the sky.
Nous avons vu la mer
We have been lovers, you and I. We have been alive in the clear mornings of Genesis; in the afternoons, among the prisms of the air, our hands have shaped perfect silences. We have seen the sea; wonder is well known to us.
The Hotel 1829 For a painter
Dusk—and the shimmer of the sea Has quickened and gone still. The large, Lithe hurricane birds soar in circles Beyond the bay, and filmy flamboyants Stand on the green embankment wavering. A goat saunters in the street. Its eyes Gleam in the headlamps like amber Held up to the moon. Curious, Seeming not to see, they remain In after images. She finds them In the wine, the bright crystal At her place. The glitter on the fog is rain;
And in rainy reach, the long beach curves Out on the glosses, the vault of lights. She sees oysters shining in their shells. Her hand on the hard linen, in candlelight, Expresses her. In a reflected arc the goat’s eyes, In the goat’s eyes a random will—and The late, faint shimmer on the sea. Great white ships roll in the harbor, illumined And gracious to the night, their ornaments Burn on the blur beyond the Hotel 1829.
If It Could Ascend
I behold there The far, faint motion of leaves. The leaves shine, And they will shiver down to death. Something like a leaf lies here within me; It wavers almost not at all, And there is no light to see it by— That it withers upon a black field. If it could ascend the thousand years into my mouth, I would make a word of it at last, And I would speak it into the silence of the sun.
Prayer for Words
And, God, if my mute heart expresses me, I am the rolling thunder and the bursts Of torrents upon rock, the whispering Of old leaves, the silence of deep canyons. I am the rattle of mortality.
I could tell of the splintered sun. I could Articulate the night sky, had I words.
Meditation on Wilderness
In the evening’s orange and umber light, There come 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 bears parade the deeper continent As silences pervade the firmament, And wind wavers on the radiant rime.
Seven Photographs of Winter
1. Here is another season of the air, An essence other seasons softly bear. The wind engenders dreams of holiness, And we are come to goodness, more or less: To wish you all that you deserve.
4. This year the weather was crisp and clear, of a New Mexican brightness that is like glitter on the air. In January there was a perfect day for the Matachina, a Spanish dance that expresses in art the unique amalgamation of Spanish and Indian cultures in the Southwest. When I was a boy I had seen the dance in falling snow and imagined that it could not be more beautiful. But the purity of light this year gave to the costumes of the dancers a brilliance beyond my imagining. The costumes of the Matachina are the most colorful of all in Pueblo ceremony—scarves and ribbons of every color,
Sometimes when I look along a corridor of the earth, I am aware that someone, a thousand years ago, saw exactly what I see, for the rocks and mountains are perpetual calendars, telling the soul’s time. And what is entered there are the numerals of eternity. I see and come away in humility.
The Northern Dawn At Coppermine I saw the Northern Lights.
They wove a green and purple drapery, Shimmering in place, seeming to descend. Nothing could seem more constant, more Perpetual in pale motion. But brief, ephemeral They were, mere fringes of the ghostly havoc That pervades the universe, the silent strings Of infinity, the colors of music beyond time.
Division
There is a depth of darkness In the wild country, days of evening And the silence of the moon. I have crept upon the bare ground Where animals have left their tracks, And faint cries carry on the summits, Or sink to silence in the muffled leaves. Here is the world of wolves and bears And of old, instinctive being, So noble and indifferent as to be remote To human knowing. The scales upon which We seek a balance measure only a divide.
The Old Cemetery
Belonging is the compass of my soul, And here the fractions of my self are whole. Ancestral whispers echo in my brain. They weave within me, constant as the rain.
The Passage Between
The sheer face lay opposite, Both over and under him. His lungs burned in the ascent. His eyes congealed in the cold, And at last he could not see. Or what he saw was nothing, An ice that reflected death, Present and invisible. Below he had imagined
The summit within his reach; He could not imagine now. There was only the descent Into mere experience And the blind passage between.
For Wilma Mankiller, an Honor Song
Your spirit is known to the earth. You are worthy of great renown. The river knows of your spirit, The forest knows of your spirit, The mountain knows of your spirit, The prairie knows of your spirit.
An Aspect of Condition
We contemplate the urgency
And engine of our fantasy,
The stars vibrating far and wide,
Abiding on the other side
Of time and distance and remorse.
We would have trade with them of course
And be the ones who dance and play
On silk roads of the Milky Way,
Until we splinter on the bone
And murmur this: we are alone.
To Tell You of My Love[2]
Now hear my words falling like snow Upon your hair. Beloved, know My song returns your deepest dream, My breath the lucent soul you seem. Eh neh neh neh, Oh, my beloved.
Honor Song in the Old Style For Vine Deloria, Jr.
Where words were first shaped
Into sacred bundles and placed
On altars of earth and stone
We made prayers of thanksgiving
glad to have been summoned
glad to have been given names
glad to have been touched by the sun
glad to have heard the silence.
For we have seen the animals That linger in primordial dark, Parade in step and intervals That mark millennia, an arc Of time beyond the reckoning. Whose hand has traced these living lines? Whose mind has ventured past the thing That mere mortality confines? Horse, bison, auroch, bear, and deer, Convene forever in the night, Their ghosts, in old communion here, Emerge in stark, forgotten light.
Or has their spirit thrived unseen, Bled into earth and rock?— In attitudes austere, serene, Evincing myth, story, epoch.
This felt like such a blessing to read after the passing of the author, a day I deeply mourned for the loss to the world of such a singular, beautiful mind, and because I don’t know what his people believed about death so I could properly mourn or not mourn. I imagine it doesn’t matter, and I think he would forgive me and say, I speak from my heart from my tradition, you do the same. And from my heart, I cherish the image of him standing in a cave in France, the Old Country, the origin of the nightmare that befell this continent, and marvelling at the communion of those early humans and I think he has joined the eternal “convening,” the wisest of souls to walk this earth, and I pay respect and thanks to the earth that I strive to keep as he taught us.
We are told that writing is about six thousand years old. The oral tradition is inestimably older, as old as language itself.
My principal objective as a poet is to write directly from my mind and heart in the traditions that are my heritage. To trade in the wonder of words and to be acquainted with those whose best expressions have sustained us, that is literature. —N.
Earth and I Gave You Turquoise
Earth and I gave you turquoise
When you walked singing
Low light upon the rim; a wind informs
This distance with a gathering of storms
And drifts in silver crescents on the grass,
Configurations that appear, and pass.
Headwaters
Noon in the intermountain plain:
There is scant telling of the marsh—
A log, hollow and weather-stained,
An insect at the mouth, and moss—
Yet waters rise against the roots,
Stand brimming to the stalks. What moves?
What moves on this archaic force
Was wild and welling at the source.
The Colors of Night
1. WHITE An old man’s son was killed far away in the Staked Plains. When the old man heard of it he went there and gathered up the bones. Thereafter, wherever the old man ventured, he led a dark hunting horse which bore the bones of his son on its back. And the old man said to whomever he saw: “You see how it is that now my son consists in his bones, that his bones are polished and so gleam like glass in the light of the sun and moon, that he is very beautiful.”
The Monoliths
The wind lay upon me.
The monoliths were there
In the long light, standing
Cleanly apart from time.
The Gourd Dancer
Another season centers on this place.
Like memory the sun recedes in time
Into the hazy, southern distances.
And owl ascends
Among the branches, clattering, remote
Within its motion, intricate with age.
Dancing,
He dreams, he dreams— The long wind glances, moves
Forever as a music to the mind; The gourds are flashes of the sun.
Crows in a Winter Composition
This morning the snow,
The soft distances
Beyond the trees
In which nothing appeared—
Nothing appeared. The several silences,
Imposed one upon another,
Were unintelligible.
on the farther rim the grasses flicker and blur, a hawk brushes rain across the dusk, meadows recede into mountains, and here and there are moons like salmonberries upon the glacial face of the sky.
Nous avons vu la mer
We have been lovers, you and I. We have been alive in the clear mornings of Genesis; in the afternoons, among the prisms of the air, our hands have shaped perfect silences. We have seen the sea; wonder is well known to us.
The Hotel 1829 For a painter
Dusk—and the shimmer of the sea Has quickened and gone still. The large, Lithe hurricane birds soar in circles Beyond the bay, and filmy flamboyants Stand on the green embankment wavering. A goat saunters in the street. Its eyes Gleam in the headlamps like amber Held up to the moon. Curious, Seeming not to see, they remain In after images. She finds them In the wine, the bright crystal At her place. The glitter on the fog is rain;
And in rainy reach, the long beach curves Out on the glosses, the vault of lights. She sees oysters shining in their shells. Her hand on the hard linen, in candlelight, Expresses her. In a reflected arc the goat’s eyes, In the goat’s eyes a random will—and The late, faint shimmer on the sea. Great white ships roll in the harbor, illumined And gracious to the night, their ornaments Burn on the blur beyond the Hotel 1829.
If It Could Ascend
I behold there The far, faint motion of leaves. The leaves shine, And they will shiver down to death. Something like a leaf lies here within me; It wavers almost not at all, And there is no light to see it by— That it withers upon a black field. If it could ascend the thousand years into my mouth, I would make a word of it at last, And I would speak it into the silence of the sun.
Prayer for Words
And, God, if my mute heart expresses me, I am the rolling thunder and the bursts Of torrents upon rock, the whispering Of old leaves, the silence of deep canyons. I am the rattle of mortality.
I could tell of the splintered sun. I could Articulate the night sky, had I words.
Meditation on Wilderness
In the evening’s orange and umber light, There come 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 bears parade the deeper continent As silences pervade the firmament, And wind wavers on the radiant rime.
Seven Photographs of Winter
1. Here is another season of the air, An essence other seasons softly bear. The wind engenders dreams of holiness, And we are come to goodness, more or less: To wish you all that you deserve.
4. This year the weather was crisp and clear, of a New Mexican brightness that is like glitter on the air. In January there was a perfect day for the Matachina, a Spanish dance that expresses in art the unique amalgamation of Spanish and Indian cultures in the Southwest. When I was a boy I had seen the dance in falling snow and imagined that it could not be more beautiful. But the purity of light this year gave to the costumes of the dancers a brilliance beyond my imagining. The costumes of the Matachina are the most colorful of all in Pueblo ceremony—scarves and ribbons of every color,
Sometimes when I look along a corridor of the earth, I am aware that someone, a thousand years ago, saw exactly what I see, for the rocks and mountains are perpetual calendars, telling the soul’s time. And what is entered there are the numerals of eternity. I see and come away in humility.
The Northern Dawn At Coppermine I saw the Northern Lights.
They wove a green and purple drapery, Shimmering in place, seeming to descend. Nothing could seem more constant, more Perpetual in pale motion. But brief, ephemeral They were, mere fringes of the ghostly havoc That pervades the universe, the silent strings Of infinity, the colors of music beyond time.
Division
There is a depth of darkness In the wild country, days of evening And the silence of the moon. I have crept upon the bare ground Where animals have left their tracks, And faint cries carry on the summits, Or sink to silence in the muffled leaves. Here is the world of wolves and bears And of old, instinctive being, So noble and indifferent as to be remote To human knowing. The scales upon which We seek a balance measure only a divide.
The Old Cemetery
Belonging is the compass of my soul, And here the fractions of my self are whole. Ancestral whispers echo in my brain. They weave within me, constant as the rain.
The Passage Between
The sheer face lay opposite, Both over and under him. His lungs burned in the ascent. His eyes congealed in the cold, And at last he could not see. Or what he saw was nothing, An ice that reflected death, Present and invisible. Below he had imagined
The summit within his reach; He could not imagine now. There was only the descent Into mere experience And the blind passage between.
For Wilma Mankiller, an Honor Song
Your spirit is known to the earth. You are worthy of great renown. The river knows of your spirit, The forest knows of your spirit, The mountain knows of your spirit, The prairie knows of your spirit.
An Aspect of Condition
We contemplate the urgency
And engine of our fantasy,
The stars vibrating far and wide,
Abiding on the other side
Of time and distance and remorse.
We would have trade with them of course
And be the ones who dance and play
On silk roads of the Milky Way,
Until we splinter on the bone
And murmur this: we are alone.
To Tell You of My Love[2]
Now hear my words falling like snow Upon your hair. Beloved, know My song returns your deepest dream, My breath the lucent soul you seem. Eh neh neh neh, Oh, my beloved.
Honor Song in the Old Style For Vine Deloria, Jr.
Where words were first shaped
Into sacred bundles and placed
On altars of earth and stone
We made prayers of thanksgiving
glad to have been summoned
glad to have been given names
glad to have been touched by the sun
glad to have heard the silence.
March 26, 2013
Lots of adept work in forms.
Read
March 10, 2016Complex poetry. Momaday plays with rhyme and length of lines/syllables a lot. Most of the poems seem to be metaphors for death.
Read
March 11, 2016Complex poetry. Momaday plays with rhyme and length of lines/syllables a lot. Most of the poems seem to be metaphors for death.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews