a photograph by Sonja Bingen
Lost
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
“Who were these people?”
“They were people
who overpopulated their planet,
depleting all its natural elements.”
“They were at continuous war
with each other,
never satisfied with their treaties.”
“Eventually they lost their atmosphere.”
“Then nothing stayed on the planet.
Everything blew off.”
“Yes, in just a few thousand years
their life and their planet died.”
“They called themselves Earth, I think.
Earth.”
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry
Leo
a photograph by Alazanto, Kevin Davis, our son
What Ethel and I remember the most about Leo is a day at the hospital in Poughkeepsie, New York when Kevin was struggling to even move. The nurses at the hospital moved him downstairs in a wheelchair, and Leo, a cat he’d rescued who had hid in his car’s engine on a cold day, was there. Leo curled up next to Kevin as if he knew how ill his young rescuer was, and Kevin’s whole demeanor lost some of its pallor and, for a brief moment in time, the world seemed brighter than it had just a few moments before.
Filed under Art, Photography
Navajo Technical University Project
One of the projects I have been working on, along with a lot of other people, has been a new educational model centered on the Bond Wilson Technical Center in Kirtland, NM. Kathy Isaacson, who has been key to helping put the project together, created this video of the project. I appear in it toward the end of the video.
Filed under Essays, Thomas Davis
Beside the Cottonwood
a villanelle by Thomas Davis
“Beside the cottonwood,” I start to say.
She looks at me. Words fade out of my head.
What now? I think. I focus on the way
She’s standing by the massive tree, the gray
Streaked through her hair a halo that has wed
Her essence to the glinting interplay
Of light and shadow dancing leaves that sway
And flutter in a breeze that seems to tread
Out from the tree into the fields of day.
The sudden silence morphs into dismay,
Confusion, even, maybe, just a hint of dread.
What if, inside a moment, disarray
Has somehow found our lives and cutaway
The passion in our hearts that’s always led
To moments that are glorious and fey.
But then she smiles. The tree’s roots dig through clay
And living sustenance flows to the spread
Of branches reaching to the sky, the play
Of light her spirit as my spirit’s quay.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis
