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I saw the article in
the High Country News,

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and I read the
really nasty letter

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that Richard wrote to
the warden, Warden Fizer.

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And I didn't really understand,
he had the Jim Lehrer

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people in there with
cameras inside the prison,

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in his workshops,
and here was just

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because he'd had a photographer
out front of the prison,

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in the desert--

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I mean, if you see the
picture, some of you

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might have seen it
in High Country News,

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if you see the
picture, you can't even

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tell there's a prison
in the picture,

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it's just a picture
of Dick standing

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in front of a bunch of desert.

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So I don't understand why they
would revoke his volunteer

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privileges because
of a photograph,

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especially since all those
years that I knew him, 12 years,

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he brought all kinds of
contraband into the prison.

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Contraband books,
contraband poetry,

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they called it
unauthorized writing,

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and he talks about this in
his book, "Crossing the Yard".

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Unauthorized writing,
what is that?

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Unauthorized writing.

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But those books were a window
for us to the outside world

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and this is a short piece from
"Wilderness and Razor Wire",

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which won the John Burroughs
Medal for Natural History

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Writing, it's like
the highest award

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you can get for nature writing.

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And the reason I have
this award is because

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of that man sitting over there.

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[APPLAUSE]

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Richard Shelton
loaned me his copy

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of "Trek: A Man Alone
in the Wilderness,"

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by Geoffrey Platts, a local
guru of environmental causes.

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And when I turn to page 92,
a single cottonwood leaf

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slips into my lap.

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It is a gift from
the author, no doubt,

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although he never
could have imagined

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the leaf would find its way
into the hands of a prisoner.

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I'm appreciative, thrilled,
there are no cottonwoods here,

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and it's been a
long time since I've

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held one of these untreated
tokens of rivers and summer.

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There is a pain that arises
whenever something reminds

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me of what I'm connected to.

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I risk the pain of memory
by turning the leaf over

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in my hand, raising it to
the light of my cell window,

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pressing it to my nose.

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Thin and brown and veined,
it is an old vegetable

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hand with delicate
lifelines of history,

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of youth's chlorophyll glory,
of life's insect scars,

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of death's wrinkles
and liver spots.

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I hold hands with a corpse of
a familiar desert oasis, Sabino

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Canyon or Romero
Pools, San Pedro River,

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and it speaks to
me vegetable words.

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I open my notebook
to embrace it,

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to preserve it in pencil,
an act of compassion that

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loosens my thoughts to drift
and settle among boulders, slick

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with the mossy breadth
of black water,

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and risk further the
blood of memory."

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It was a cottonwood
leaf, it wasn't

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another kind of leaf that I--

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I tried smoking it, no I didn't.

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