One of the first members of my personal library

I worked at the Barnes & Noble in Amarillo when I was 18. I shelved books one night, and came across Simon Ortiz's After and Before the Lightening. I loved the cover. It was familiar. The winter plains of the Dakotas look so similar to the Texas Panhandle in January. From that collection, these lines:

Lightning IV

Why we should keep riding
toward the storm, we don't know.
It is right on the hills, short miles
away, the wind twisting the elms
furiously all along the road from Winner.
It is perhaps way past questioning,
past the moment when it's too late.
Our only certainty, when the horizon
is no longer clear, is our memory
of how our journey has been till now.
We bank on that as we watch the sky
and the prairie become knotted finally
into inexorable event. It is vast
and enormous before us, this knowledge
that we could have turned back and now
still could in fact before decision
is lost to us at last.

Yet there is
no such chance we give ourselves here.
The destiny on the unseen hills holds
us fatefully, and it doesn't really matter.
When we slow down on the thin strip
of the highway that is our lives,
the decision is now God's we believe.
The storm's spirit is brilliant fire
flickering deliciously on the horizon
that is no longer ours to reach for.

We don't know the storm anymore,
the fragile journey we yearned to take
homeward or away from it is ours now
because we cannot free ourselves from
where it enjoins us to place and place.
We do finally know why we don't turn
from danger or beauty or sadness or joy.
How completely we feel the tremoring
and shuddering pulse of the land now
as we welcome the rain-heart-lightning
into our trembling yearning selves.

-- Simon J. Ortiz