Again the Far Morning

New and Selected Poems

N. Scott Momaday

• Publisher: UNM Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780826348425
• eBook ISBN: 9780826348449
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

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 poems: 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.

New Poems

There Was a Time

There was a time

I wanted nothing so much as you.

In the rain I loved you, in the hot days.

The corn ripened. We were children of storms

And of seasons.

We ventured from each other and were lost.

But, oh, those salty songs of the damned!

Death has a green foot,

And we dance like fools.

Anywhere in a Street into the Night

Desire will come of waiting

Here at this window—I bring

In old urgency and fear

Upon me, and anywhere

Is a street into the night,

Deliverance and delight—

And evenly it will pass

Like this image on the glass

American Ballad

Where do you come from,

And where do you go?

Where do you come from,

My Cotton-eye Joe?

Well, I come from the darkness,

And I come in despair.

I come from the darkness

And again will go there.

Black smoke’s arisin’,

Yonder comes a train.

Winter’s comin’ on,

Hear the whistle in the rain.

Down in the valley,

The valley so low,

The rails run to darkness.

To darkness I’ll go.

Well, there do you come from,

And there do you go,

For there do you come from,

My Cotton-eye Joe.

The Stones at Carlisle

Here are six rows of children. How

Symmetrical the small array.

The names are dim and distant now.

We come and go, and here they stay.

Please pray they rest, and bless each name,

Then reckon innocence and shame.

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.

Plainview 3

The sun appearing

a pendant

of clear cutbeads, flashing;

a drip of pollen

and glitter

lapping and overlapping

night:

a prairie fire.

An Ivory Edge

What of those fingers,

Those long lovely hands?

Will you place them so

Upon the linen

Of god, the pristine snow,

And carve old epics

With your story knife?

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 indif...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Angle of Geese, 1974
• The Gourd Dancer, 1976
• In the Presence of the Sun, 1992
• In the Bear’s House, 1999
• New Poems