by Ethel Mortenson Davis
we cannot go
to another planet,
to another earth
in another solar system.
We are too late for that,
too far away.
Instead, we must
sit down, you and I,
and look into each other’s eyes,
our arms embracing,
before we can save
any of us.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Photography, poems, Poetry
Tribal College Press has launched Meditation on Ceremonies of Beginnings! The book went up on their site, https://tribalcollegejournal.org/buy-meditation-on-ceremonies-of-beginnings, yesterday. I have emphasizing the Tribal College Press site for purchases because any purchase here goes to help the tribal college movement out through work that the Tribal College Journal does with all of the colleges.
To me, at least, this is the most important book I have ever written, as accidental as it is in some senses. It represents decades of work for all the tribal colleges and specifically for the colleges that I worked directly for over much of my life. Imbedded in the book also are all the sacrifices Ethel and my children, Sonja, Mary, and Kevin, made during the years when I was working so hard to make so many things happen of American Indian communities and students in individual communities and nationwide. I also want to celebrate Ethel’s magnificent pastel the press used for the cover.
I received my first copy of the finished book at the house yesterday, and I was surprised at how much emotion it generated in me. The tribal colleges and universities and international indigenous controlled institutions of higher learning are so important! All of us need to reach out, if we are not American Indian people, to the original people of this land and celebrate them and feel the power of what they and their communities have to offer the world. I hope that in the pages of this book of poetry both Indians and non-Indians can find the spirit of the tribal colleges and universities and then become inspired to support them in some concrete way. They are still among the poorest funded colleges and universities in this country even though they are doing God’s work in some of the poorest places in the United States.
Filed under Art, poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
The old men are dreaming bad dreams. The rain will not fall on our land. Even the deep water stays away. I yearn for the earth to give us her blessing, her sanction, so we can harvest the oats and rye again, so I can run to the far field to wrap my arms around the face of my horse and dream good dreams.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
In my dream it was nighttime. I was in a muddy field overlooking a large city with bright lights. The field was enclosed with barbed wire, and there was a herd of cattle within the enclosure. The cattle were not really cattle, but were members of my family. They were up to their bellies in mud, unable to move. Hundreds of poisonous frogs were climbing onto the cattle, killing them with their bites. This was a foretelling, a story of betrayal and pain, a story of survival and transcendence, an ancient story. Come over here and sit down by this tree, and I will tell you this story. It is a story of my life and yours.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
At birth, the farmer separated the calf from its mother. He wiped away the amniotic fluid with a gunny sack before putting him in a separate pen. Black children born to enslaved parents were taken from their weeping mothers and moved hundreds of miles away. Native children were snatched from anxious parents and moved to some miserable life. A Central American baby Is ripped from its mother’s arms. Both baby and mother’s spirits are broken. The farmer’s wife protested, “keep the calf with its mother. Do you need every ounce of milk?” “This is the way we do things,” replied the farmer.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry
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.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry
Meditations on the Ceremonies of Beginnings is a book of poetry developed over decades as I played my small role in the tribal colleges and universities and world indigenous nation’s higher education consortium movements. Tribal College Press has announced it will be released in late November. The cover design just came in! The drawing is by Ethel Mortenson Davis.
You’ll have to enlarge to cover to read the writing, but I am especially excited about what Carrie Billy, one of the great leaders of the tribal college and university movement, and Kimberly Blaeser, on the most important Native American poets in the United States, say about the book.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis
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.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry
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.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry
The Door County Poets Collective has released its newest book, Halfway to the North Pole! A unique poetry anthology, it’s available at Sturgeon Bay’s bookstores and through either Write On Door County or fourwindowspress1.com. It is published by Four Windows Press, the small publishing company Ethel and I own.
There are a lot of Door County’s most important poets represented in the book as well as other poets that have been loyal visitors over the years. Estella Lauter, the instigator of the Collective, in her “Preface” describes the theme of the anthology: “We hope these poems, while providing some anchors in parts of the County you know, will introduce you to places, people, and issues you haven’t noticed and might want to know better on your own: places like Mud Lake, Three Springs, Bjorklunden, Mojo Rosa’s; people like Increase Claflin or Norbert Blei; efforts to bring back the Monarch Butterflies, preserve the night sky, cut or treat infected ash trees, keep the Boreal forest. Door County is not only a beautiful place where culture and nature support each other; it is also a complex community of people and other creatures who come together to care for the land and water that sustain our lives in all seasons. Halfway between the hottest and coldest places on earth, we like to think we have the best of both.”
