If It Could Ascend

Painting by Howard Terpning

If It Could Ascend


I behold there
the far, faint motion of leaves.
The leaves shine,
and they will shiver down to death.
Something like a leaf lies here within me;
it wavers almost not at all,
and there is no light to see it by -
that it withers upon a black field.
If it could ascend the thousand years into my mouth,
I would make a word of it at last,
and I would speak it into the silence of the sun.

N. Scott Momaday
From the book In The Presence of the Sun © 1992.