And a lot of this, the poems in this book are about,
it's a love.
I guess you'd call it a love letter.
To this place on the Navajo Nation Homeland
called Tséyi', which means deep in the rock.
And it's known on maps as Canyon De Chelly.
I'm sure some of you have been there.
It's a very beautiful place.
So these poems are focused on that place.
And I grew up on the other side of that mountain.
But I never went there until I was in college.
Blue horses running.
Possibilities exist with you where sagebrush
dots the desert scape, where a string of crows
float like beads on a turquoise sky,
and where mountains hold plants spread out like a blanket.
We traveled the colors of brilliant red rock cliffs that
form within ancestral space.
We travel on the colors of the rainbow
and know what it means to come forth, to awaken.
Here, it's possible that--
here it's possible to know that you belong to the Earth.
In a language that names us, that this place
formed you, and carved the high bones in your face.
Cedar and rock monoliths know the motion of wind.
The patience of waiting, the gathering of strength.
Here, it's possible to know the world,
in the words of our ancestors.
The simple beauty of blue horses running.
[APPLAUDING]