Now that I can have her only in memory, I see my grandmother in the several postures that were peculiar to her: - N. Scott Momaday

Now when I hear spoken—mostly by the older people who are passing away—it is to me very good. ...the sound is like a warm wind that arises from my childhood. It is the music of memory. ...much of the power and magic and music of words consist not in the meaning but in sound. Storytellers, actors, and children know this too.

I do not speak Kiowa, and I never understood her prayers, but there was something inherently sad in the sound, some merest hesitation upon the syllables of sorrow.

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.