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 clo… - N. Scott Momaday
" "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.
About N. Scott Momaday
N. Scott Momaday (February 27, 1934 – January 24, 2024) was a Kiowa novelist, short story writer, essayist and poet. His novel House Made of Dawn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969, and is considered the first major work of the Native American Renaissance. His follow-up work The Way to Rainy Mountain blended folklore with memoir. Momaday received the National Medal of Arts in 2007 for his work's celebration and preservation of indigenous oral and art traditions. He held twenty honorary degrees from colleges and universities and was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Biography information from Wikiquote
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Additional quotes by N. Scott Momaday
Something of our relationship to the earth is determined by the particular place we stand at a given time. If you stand still long enough to observe carefully the things around you, you will find beauty, and you will know wonder. If you see a leaf carried along on the flow of a river, you might ponder its journey. Where did it begin, and where will it end? What will be the story of its passage? You will discover a thousand ways in which the leaf is connected to the water, the banks, the near and farther distances, the sky and the sun. Your mind, your spirit will be nourished and grow. You will become one with what you see. Consider what is to be seen.
The night the old man Dragonfly came to my
grandfather’s house the moon was full. It rose like a
great red planet above the black trees on the crooked
creek. Then there came a flood of pewter light on
the plain, and I could see the light ebb toward me
like water, and I thought of rivers I had never seen,
rising like ribbons of rain. And in the morning
Dragonfly came from the house, his hair in braids
and his face painted. He stood on a little mound of
earth and faced east. Then he raised his arms and
began to pray. His voice seemed to reach beyond
itself, a long way on the land, and he prayed the sun
up. The grasses glistened with dew, and a bird sang
from the dawn. This happened a long time ago. I was
not there. My father was there when he was a boy.
He told me of it. And I was there.
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