by Ethel Mortenson Davis
The new calves are growing stiff from the wetness of birth, and old men come running across the fields asking, who killed our apple-blossom time? I say to them, surely dead leaves can’t grow in your pockets now.
Category Archives: Ethel Mortenson Davis
The New Calves
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Enough
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
This last, fading light is enough to carry us across the field, across the world, enough to lift us from ourselves, our mitered lives in this small changeling of a disappearing evening.
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Places We Recognize
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
When we are desperate and can’t recognize the world, we climb into words, grasp letters, covet paragraphs to find smallness. When we are desperate we go to this small garden to gather ourselves in the act of cleaning away dying plants — to repeat our worth — in places we recognize, like the wounded fox that crawls into the small culvert.
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The Reaching
a pastel by Ethel Mortenson Davis
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One More Time
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
A baby wren came to sit in the burning bush to show me she has grown into a strong bird. With graceful gratitude she came to show me light in my dark world — just as a matched pair of horses pulled John Lewis across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, so he can be a light in our black world just one more time.
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Home
a pastel by Ethel Mortenson Davis
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Flicker
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
At dawn a loud crash sounded against the house. A flicker lay struggling on the ground, his life ending. A beautiful bird with speckled chest, yellow tail, and red feathers on his head looked as though his spine was broken. I put him in a quiet part of the garden. His weak cries were fearful. Later that day, when I checked, he seemed closer to death. The next morning when I went to collect him, he was gone. I want to think he got up and flew up to the top of my tree, but probably a cat or fox found him on their trek across the country.
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The Seer
a pastel by Ethel Mortenson Davis
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To the Innocent
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
To Troy Davis
I hope you are in a place where there is justice, where there is love unconditionally, the end where young men no longer are lynched by ropes, or the machinations of killers, where there is light and not the suffocating, ethered mud, a place where you will rise above humanness. I hope you are in a place called Justice, a place that will never be named Georgia.
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George Floyd
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
We saw how bad the killing is in this country. But the many more we did not see — children, women, and men in far away, hidden places, unknown towns, and mud-filled swamps. No one recorded their cries for help. Their blood has filled our land — up to the withers of our horses, touching the white wings of angels.
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