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The canyon is a ladder to the plain. The valley is pale in the end of July, when the corn and melons come of age and slowly the fields are made ready… - N. Scott Momaday
" "The canyon is a ladder to the plain. The valley is pale in the end of July, when the corn and melons come of age and slowly the fields are made ready for the yield, and a faint, false air of autumn — an illusion still in the land — rises somewhere away in the high north country, a vague suspicion of red and yellow on the farthest summits. And the town lies out like a scattering of bones in the heart of the land, low in the valley, where the earth is a kiln and the soil is carried here and there in the wind and all harvests are a poor survival of the seed. It is a remote place, and divided from the rest of the world by a great forked range of mountains on the north and west; by wasteland on the south and east, a region of dunes and thorns and burning columns of air; and more than these by time and silence.
English
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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
Also Known As
Birth Name:
Navarre Scott Momaday
Alternative Names:
Navarre Scott Mammedaty
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Additional quotes by N. Scott Momaday
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
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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.
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