A new bookstore has opened on Third Avenue in Sturgeon Bay! We used to have two bookstores, but they have closed. Now Margaret Magle has opened a new bookstore on Third Avenue downtown. She is, right now, featuring books by Ethel Mortenson and Thomas Davis. We are hoping both tourists and local folks visit the store at 41 N. Third Avenue since we are hoping Margaret succeeds in her new endeavor.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry, Published Books, The Dragon Epic, Thomas Davis
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
I keep looking
for the breathing holes
beneath this thick sea ice,
a place where
I can propel
up towards the light,
grasping for a breath of air
that smells like earth
and soil and green things.
I keep looking
for that rare space
because I cannot hold
my breath much longer.
There. Over there
I see some light
through honey-colored ice.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry
Four Windows Press announces the release of a new book, The Glowing Pink by Standing Feather. Standing Feather is a New Mexico poet who lives near the El Morro National Monument and the Ancient Way Cafe. He operates a gallery, Galleria Carnaval, and paints as well as writes magnificent poetry.
Copies can be ordered at amazon.com or from Standing Feather’s gallery.
Praise for The Glowing Pink
In The Glowing Pink, Standing Feather reminds us of the almost unspeakable intimacy shared by all beings. I view the poems of this collection as passageways to the sacred, to the sheer beauty and wonder of life. Reality is luminous. There are songs and blessings for “creatures that may spend their entire lives inside a flower.” What nourishes us, what makes us whole, is empathy, and an awareness of our union with the universe. Line by line, page by page, these poems are a deep bow to all of life: the vast, the miniscule, the unseen.
James Janko, winner of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Pride for the Novel, author of The Clubhouse Thief and Buffalo Boy and Geronimo
If poetry has a searing edge that is part flame and part cool, silver moonlight, mixed with the fragrance of deep emotion, it has reached beyond everydayness into a realm as wild, beautiful, and perhaps dangerous, as those regions of space where stars are born. There must be music too, even if it is subtle music, and an unusual insight into human experience and what substances are melded together to make a human spirit. It must also look outward to others, whether they are people or living parts of the earth, and create an ecosystem of connections that reflect out of the poet into the reader so that the reader can discover something vital and true about themselves. In The Glowing Pink Standing Feather achieves all of this as poem after poem images with words that either are carved from the bedrock of stone quarried from generations of poets or sparked like flashes of quicksilver dancing and twisting into a bewilderment of light and dark. If we need a reason to read poetry, then this book gives us that reason. Thomas Davis, author of The Weirding Storm and three novels.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Published Books, Uncategorized
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
I dream of
a different world:
one where I can*
take refuge,
where you and I
will be sisters,
where the First Peoples
are striding along
with the Second peoples,
learning from each other,
where they are no longer refugees
in their own land,
where freed slaves
are helped to build
new lives with the colonists,
no longer refugees
in this new land.
I dream of
a different world:
where no one is heard
shouting from a window,
“Go back to where you came from.”
* The first two stanzas are a quote from Ariel Dorfman, a refuge.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry
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
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