by Ethel Mortenson Davis
Wolf moon with yellow-green eyes, slipping between trees, slipping from heaven. Timber wolf with yellow-green eyes, slipping between trees, slipping between exploding bullets- heaven slipping between our fingers.
Category Archives: poems
Heaven
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In Memory of Juno
Poem and pastel by Ethel Mortenson Davis
Dog The way you buried your nose in my hand made me unable to forget you that cold morning at daybreak. Skin and bones you were. Perhaps a boot to your neck, or starvation sent you fleeing to my gate, asking for help. So I let you in.
Filed under Art, Art by Ethel Mortenson Davis, Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry
About Being Lost
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
As a different species, you were there in the beginning, leading the toddler clinging to the long hairs on the ruff of your neck out of the vast corn field and into the arms of frantic parents. Then, in midlife, you led us out of the western wilderness back to the road— how glad we were to find a way out. Now, in old age, you are disappearing from our lives— a little each day, as a new wilderness looms on our horizon. Who will lead us back to the road now?
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What Hope Is
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
I’ll tell you what hope is. It’s not going to the grocery store and getting yelled at for bringing your screaming son along and then next week doing it again. It is breaking through the thick cloak that surrounds him and finding a small increment of communication, reaching down into the cylinder of autism and pulling out shafts of light.
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An Artist that Uses the Color Blue
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
The first pictures of the earth from space showed a blue and white jewel shining out of the blackness. It was like seeing patches of blue in the sky after a difficult storm, blue patches that gave us hope, or seeing rare blue flowers on an ancient forest floor, or the sparse blue iris — a surprise in the dry desert. Blue is the color of promise, the color of hope.
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Christmas Day: Sledding on the Mountain
by Thomas Davis
We drove Grand Mesa’s unpaved, snow-packed roads Around its hairpin curves until the banks Of drifts were high enough to stop the plows. Grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins slammed Car doors and shouted so their voices echoed off The slopes and cliffs that soared into the sky. Then “food enough to feed an army,” sleds, Toboggans came from car trunks as the day’s Festivity spilled out into the winter cold. My Dad and Uncle dug into the snow To make a fire with driftwood, branches found Down in the canyon as we’d driven by The stream that gurgled songs beneath the ice. Then, looking down the road toward a bank That lurched uphill before a hairpin curve, The oldest of my cousins laughed and jumped Onto her sled, her head downhill, and slid Like lightning flashed into a coal-black sky: The slope so steep she flew, the hill of white A half mile down as solid as a wall, The road beneath her hard and slick as ice. Her mother, Aunt Viola, laughed to see Her fly toward the snowbank wall as I Could hardly breathe to see the tragedy Unfolding as the sunlight glared into my eyes. My eyes began to hurt. She had to crash Or slam into the wall of snow so hard She wouldn’t be my cousin anymore. But, as she hurtled down toward her doom, She dragged her legs behind the racing sled And turned the blades before she hit the hill, And everybody who had come to watch Began to yell when she rolled off the sled, Popped to her feet and shot her arm into the air. When, after other cousins dared the hill, I hesitated, swallowing to see The downhill slope, my younger brother jumped Ahead of me and joined into the fun. I stood above my sled and felt my heart Quail, staring down toward the distant bank That still seemed solid as a concrete wall. I froze and couldn’t move until my Dad, Behind me, got me on my sled and pushed Me off as cold and snow and light became A blur of flying, flying down the road. I flared my legs behind the hurtling sled And tried to slow down as I turned the blades, The running sound beneath my stomach, snow A cloud of ice as I rolled off the sled And came up, sunk in snow up to my hips, And shouted with my arm up in the air.
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Christmas
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
We dropped her off after the Christmas program. Snow was on the ground. The night was cold. We waited, with our car running, for her to get inside. But, instead of going in the front door, she scurried up a wooden ladder that was placed outside to an upstairs bedroom. Faster than a blink of an eye she went, faster than we ran up our own stairs at home.
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All of Us
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.
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Meditation on Ceremonies of Beginnings Released by Tribal College Press
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
In the Time of Covid
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.
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