by Thomas Davis
from a new play that I am writing:
Reality dips, swirls, a dance,
a pirouette, a song, a trance,
and as the mist of being drifts
a chord is struck, and what is shifts,
and fate becomes a puzzle box
secured by puzzles that are locks—
And so reality becomes
a whisper, shadow that benumbs
the heart and changes what will be
into a storm-tossed, dicey sea.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
“Why did you pick those two?
People who didn’t like girls,
didn’t want any nohow.
“But, you know, when I have girls
I’m going to love them and hold them
and tell them they are something.
“Speak with them on a summer night
when the sweet perfume
from wild honeysuckle fills the air.
“Talk to them about the wild things—
things that are important, you know, God’s things.
“Cause when I was born and grew up,
all the love I had came from the wild things—
the wind, the sky, the earth,
and the animals—not from people.
People just spoiled everything.
You know, they killed things.
“But, you know, had they been more right people,
it could have been paradise.”
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry
To the Browns Twenty-five Mesa
He presented to us
a bag of brown beans.
The work of growing food
begins with irrigating the fields,
he said,
then planting seeds…
more irrigation
and finally harvesting.
It is holy work,
like teachers and the holy men do,
the growing of food.
It Is something sacred:
work and joy together.
Note: Linda Brown blogs at https://coloradofarmlife.com. Tom and I visited her and Terry, her husband, during our trip to Colorado.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Photography, poems, Poetry, Uncategorized
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
We found her
in the mountains
near a rushing stream
carved out of white marble,
a sign of purity.
Under her whiteness
was written these words,
“…she hears the cries of the world.”
Last night
a Syrian boy and girl
lay dead under rubble,
not much older than six or seven
…cries in the world.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry
by Thomas Davis
They fought religion as a whiteness, probed
To find a way inside their lives to let
The genius centered by His love, light robed
With justice, free slaves from the numbing threat
Dredged from the God of thunder who had touched
The white race with superiority and rights
That forged the chains that bound free spirits clutched
With anguish felt through years of days and nights.
The abolitionists reached out and tried
To build invisible, faint trails the god
Of whiteness couldn’t find since he denied
The wrongs done in his name and lived a fraud
That failed to comprehend that souls of men
Could see his Christianity as sin.
Note: A sonnet from the novel, In the Unsettled Homeland of Dreams I am submitting to University of Wisconsin Press.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
The young father
bound
his newborn daughter
across his chest
and then slipped on his skis.
This was a cold February
in the land of lakes and trees
with dancing green lights.
Here he connected,
just as his ancestors
before him connected,
to the starry night,
just as his daughter
will someday bind
her infant
across her heart,
presenting a new life
under the milky-green
foam of stars,
under the great tail
of the Milky Way Galaxy
above her shoulders.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry
by Thomas Davis
The edge where sanity and fear collide
Whirls passions that are uncontrollable
Into events that spark events that tide
Across the barriers of shores and scull
Destruction, pestilence, a flood of woe
Fermented in assumptions drawn from trials
That litter through all human lives and flow
Like water over hopes, beliefs, denials,
And on the edge, in ferment’s shifting shape,
Decisions ratchet back and forth; dreams lure
The spirit as dire consequences scrape
Against the future suddenly obscure
Enough to paralyze the strength from hands
That long to civilize the hinterlands.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis
