The Death of Sitting Bear Quotes

“You are the dark shape I find
On nights of the spilling moon,
Pale in the pool of heaven.

— N. Scott Momaday, from “Revenant” The Death of Sitting Bear: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins, 2020)”
― N. Scott Momaday, The Death of Sitting Bear: New and Selected Poems – By a Pulitzer Prize Winner: Kiowa Oral Tradition, Spiritual Landscape, and the Human Condition

“A Witness to Creation

If you could have that one day back, the one that
you have kept a secret in your soul, what day would it be?
What? One among the many? Well, let me make you this offering:

It would be the day on which I stood on the rim of Monument Valley and beheld
those ineffable monoliths for the first time. I was young, you see, like a fledgling
who leaves the nest and flies out over the earth. I saw beyond time, into
timelessness. It was the first and holiest of all days. On such a day—
on that original day—did the First Man behold the First World. It filled
him with wonder and humility. Then and there, looking for one enchanted
moment into eternity, I was the First Man. I was present at Creationl”
― N. Scott Momaday, The Death of Sitting Bear: New and Selected Poems – By a Pulitzer Prize Winner: Kiowa Oral Tradition, Spiritual Landscape, and the Human Condition

“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.
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, 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 – By a Pulitzer Prize Winner: Kiowa Oral Tradition, Spiritual Landscape, and the Human Condition

“La tierra del Encanto

Clouds build on the northern ridge
Where the shades of night grow pale
And there comes a rain like smoke.
The mountains loom and recede. And
Below, the umber plain is a pitted hide.
There the distance of time runs out.
And the mind extends beyond itself.

I have seen in the twist of wind
The landscape severed and heard
The edged cries of streaming hawks
First light is a tapestry on canyon walls,
And shadows are pools of illusions.
I am a man of the ancient earth
For I have know the desert at dawn”
― N. Scott Momaday, The Death of Sitting Bear: New and Selected Poems – By a Pulitzer Prize Winner: Kiowa Oral Tradition, Spiritual Landscape, and the Human Condition

“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 – By a Pulitzer Prize Winner: Kiowa Oral Tradition, Spiritual Landscape, and the Human Condition

“I could tell of the splintered sun. I could
Articulate the night sky, had I words.”
― N. Scott Momaday, The Death of Sitting Bear: New and Selected Poems – By a Pulitzer Prize Winner: Kiowa Oral Tradition, Spiritual Landscape, and the Human Condition

“Translate yourself to spirit; Be present on your journey. Keep to the trees and waters. Be the singing of the soil.”
― N. Scott Momaday, The Death of Sitting Bear: New and Selected Poems – By a Pulitzer Prize Winner: Kiowa Oral Tradition, Spiritual Landscape, and the Human Condition

“Oh my brother, I hear your footsteps
In the forest. They are strong and even;
They sound the rhythm of your great heart.”
― N. Scott Momaday, The Death of Sitting Bear: New and Selected Poems – By a Pulitzer Prize Winner: Kiowa Oral Tradition, Spiritual Landscape, and the Human Condition

“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 – By a Pulitzer Prize Winner: Kiowa Oral Tradition, Spiritual Landscape, and the Human Condition

“Song of Longing
Will you come to me now
Thee white moon shines on the cornfields
Evening falls among the melon rows
The orange sun sets on the mountains
The river runs sparkling on blue stones
And the long reeds bend and sway
I will welcome you with sweetgrass and sage
Will you come to me now
I sing in my heart of your coming
I sing in my soul of your coming”
― N. Scott Momaday, The Death of Sitting Bear: New and Selected Poems – By a Pulitzer Prize Winner: Kiowa Oral Tradition, Spiritual Landscape, and the Human Condition

“The Essence of Belonging:
…You persist,
And a clean wind measures your persistence.

Along a cleavage in space the day becomes,
And you conspire in the invention of belonging,
Radiant, jealously imagined, estranged from time,

And to the crowded habitation of the mind
You bring a solitude, a mere and sensual silence
In which the essence of belonging belongs.”
― N. Scott Momaday, The Death of Sitting Bear: New and Selected Poems – By a Pulitzer Prize Winner: Kiowa Oral Tradition, Spiritual Landscape, and the Human Condition

“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.”
― N. Scott Momaday, The Death of Sitting Bear: New and Selected Poems – By a Pulitzer Prize Winner: Kiowa Oral Tradition, Spiritual Landscape, and the Human Condition

“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 – By a Pulitzer Prize Winner: Kiowa Oral Tradition, Spiritual Landscape, and the Human Condition

“A Story of Light

When the leaves turn
And the light of the forest deepens,
I will remember a thousand words between us.
Those that enclosed us, as in the pattern
Of shadows that shiver with the turning leaves,
Recount a story that was told about us by those
Who told stories in the caves. We danced
To the music of the words. On our tongues
Were shaped the names of our original being.
This is what the storyteller said: The leaves turn,
And in the light that emanates from the leaves
There is enchantment. There is wonder.”
― N. Scott Momaday, The Death of Sitting Bear: New and Selected Poems – By a Pulitzer Prize Winner: Kiowa Oral Tradition, Spiritual Landscape, and the Human Condition