These poems are my prayer "to create the totality of my loves into a living bridge for my progeny to cross." The richness of these western lands, peoples and their culture are reflected each day in cliffs towering above our new home. Our senses are sharpened by their strangely beautiful spires and by the fragrances of our local flora, by ravens' and quails' cries, and by coyotes' singing. The Navajo heritage is expressed in the woven testaments of their lives, in their rugs created from the natural colored wools of their sheep and with dye colors of desert plants. It is also in the native...

Adele Seronde is a painter, poet and community activist. She has exhibited in galleries on the east coast, in southwest Arizona and in Italy over the last sixty years, as well as published poetry for both adults and schoolchildren. During the year 1968, answering the challenging anger of America's citizens at Martin Luther King's assassination, she helped organize a unifying citywide program: the Mayor of Boston's Neighborhood Art's Festival, to bring the imagination and beauty of the arts to help heal people. Besides writing or contributing to five books of poetry, Seronde has written two...