After And Before The Lightning - 94 edition

Ortiz, Simon J. :

Simon J. Ortiz is a poet, fiction writer, essayist, and storyteller. He is a native of Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico, where he grew up at Deetseyaamah, a rural village area in the Acoma Pueblo community. He is the father of three children-Raho, Rainy, and Saraand and is a grandfather. As a major Native writer, he insists on telling the story of his people's land, culture, and community, a story that has been marred by social, political, economic, and cultural conflicts with Euro-American society. Ortiz's insistence, however, is upon a story that stresses vision and hope by creative struggle and resistance against human and technological oppression. His previous works include Men on the Moon, Speaking for the Generations, After and Before the Lightning, Woven Stone, Fightin, The People Shall Continue, and Howbah Indians. He has received award recognition from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund Award, a ''Returning the Gift'' Lifetime Achievement Award, and a New Mexico Humanities Council Humanitarian Award. Presently he lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Voyage to Haven


Safe haven
in this dark night,
the swells of the galactic seas
bearing us toward unseen stars farther
away than we thought. Knowing we can never again
calculate the wind and the distance
we longed for, we still know
the certain gauge of hope.
Now we come to this,
the dark haven.




Sun Prayer


Look,the sun!
For some brief moments,
masses of clouds permit light.
An odd patch of torn silvery orange cloth.
Pray for light then, always
the need, these moments.
Sun needs prayer.





First Prayers


First, say a prayer.
First, put on the coffee.
First, build the fire.
First, get dressed.
First, say a prayer again.
First, these things.






Copyright © 1999 The Arizona Board of Regents

''[Ortiz] is keenly aware of place, so much so that the reader realizes that [he] is measuring his life to his surroundings, elegantly...''

--Gary Soto

''A masterpiece, a symphony composed of poems of celebration and prayers for survival in America's prairie winter of the soul.''

--Leslie Marmon Silko

''Ortiz is marvelously adept at capturing the moody stages of cabin fever, wonder for the endurance of the land, and the quiet humility of a semi-foreign culture.''

--Booklist

University of Arizona Press Web Site, November, 2000