by Ethel Mortenson Davis
Before you come
into the wilderness
you must leave
your anger and hate
behind you.
You must open your heart
and extend your arms
before you can see
the new ground-cover plants
whose leaves feel
like a baby’s skin.
Look!
A yellow swallowtail.
She is leading us
through the shaded trees
and wants us to follow.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry, Uncategorized
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
When I was young
I yearned for a pony,
a brown, bushy-maned,
fast-stepping pony:
One that I could let
have his head
and taste what freedom
really was.
When I was older,
I told everyone
I was going to marry
a man from the West
that owned a horse ranch.
Now I’m getting too old
to ride horses,
but can watch herds
of wild horses
in the West —
if they can keep
from getting caught
and made slaves out of;
they are the freest
of all horses,
like birds
who are the freest
of us all.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry
a pastel by Ethel Mortenson Davis
Filed under Art, Art by Ethel Mortenson Davis, Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry
a pastel by Ethel Mortenson Davis
Filed under Art, Art by Ethel Mortenson Davis, Ethel Mortenson Davis
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
We are going
to a movie
in Minneapolis.
He spoke.
Brokeback Mountain
is showing,
he grinned.
A willing mother,
surrounded by a sea
of young men,
A twinkling
In his eye —
a captured memory
in a wind of thoughts.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry
Ethel has published yet another new book Here We Breathe In Sky and Out Sky. It should be available shortly on amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com.
You can purchase it today at http://www.lulu.com/shop/ethel-mortenson-davis/here-we-breathe-in-sky-and-out-sky/paperback/product-23134037.html. Reviews of the book are also appreciated. On the back cover the book is described in this way:
This is Ethel Mortenson Davis’s fourth book of poetry. The poems in this book are intense, filled with the magic light of New Mexico, imagistic in the same sense that H.D.’s and Ezra Pound’s early poetry was imagistic, spiritual, and transcendent. The visual nature of the poems relates to Davis’s skill as an artist trained at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. This nature also brings alive the high desert, mountain, and cliff country in which the poetry was written. The people that appear in the poems are multi-cultural, Navajo, Zuni Pueblo, and Anglos, that are living lives made complex by the long, sometimes difficult, history of New Mexico. There is a magic sense of New Mexican light in this book, and always a sense of here we breathe in sky and out sky.
I hope some of you will consider purchase a paperback copy.
Filed under Art, Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry, Published Books
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
It’s been too long
since we last talked.
I must tell you
that men have had
their way with her.
She is hurt and sick,
but keeps giving us gifts,
ignoring their torture
and disrespect.
Today she surprises us
with the white hares.
They hop over each other
making giggling sounds,
laughing at the prairie grasses.
She gives the spring rain
that coaxes green buds.
Soon we will plant
tomato and egg plants.
She gives us seeds to sprout,
not darkness, nor pain,
nor death.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry
