by Ethel Mortenson Davis
Ripe chokecherries
on the branch
remind me
of the bitterness
of winter’s coming.
Category Archives: poems
Chokecherries
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry
Poetry’s One Language: Taliesin in New Mexico
by Thomas Davis
Taliesin walked a sparse wood.
Pink and white stones sheered into cliffs.
This was not the wild seacoast where clerics and bards warred,
declaiming words of power,
but a land as dry as Job’s tongue:
“Where shall wisdom be found?”
The bard had stood on a black rock jutting into sea-fury.
He had called mists and forest spirits,
swarming to gestures and words like ghostly raiments,
then walked through a shimmering gate into sweltering skies.
Standing below a tall, red cliff, he sent his spirit
across a dry land and walked,
feeling poetry falter in the great silence.
On a sandstone table he stopped and stared at hairy black spiders.
A thousand scuttled across the red stone in frenzy.
He could not understand spider’s movement’s language.
He could not feel poetry’s spirit ebb and flow
where no coracle boats or sailing ships plied waves.
He studied a turquoise juniper tree’s green flame
and tried to feel how such small trees could walk,
but they seemed rooted in fields of pink and white stone.
Taliesin trudged with his staff through a long day.
Sun blazed; a horned moon, waxing, rose.
The bard’s heart shuddered.
How was he to escape a land where poetry was tenuous?
Where no selkie dived beneath waves into seaweed forests?
He listened: Women’s voices elegant and wild with frenzy –
Men speaking words as strange as the landscape.
A red wolf howled beneath stars and horned moon.
A cold wind blew.
Pinyon, pine, and juniper branches danced and sang.
The bard smiled and raised arms out of his brown robe.
He spoke poetry’s one language to night sky, trees, and wind.
A black rock jutted into a foaming, wind-driven sea.
Note: The is a rewrite of a poem posted a long time ago.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis
Forgiveness
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
Before you come
into the wilderness
you must leave
your anger and hate
behind you.
You must open your heart
and extend your arms
before you can see
the new ground-cover plants
whose leaves feel
like a baby’s skin.
Look!
A yellow swallowtail.
She is leading us
through the shaded trees
and wants us to follow.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry, Uncategorized
Freedom
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
When I was young
I yearned for a pony,
a brown, bushy-maned,
fast-stepping pony:
One that I could let
have his head
and taste what freedom
really was.
When I was older,
I told everyone
I was going to marry
a man from the West
that owned a horse ranch.
Now I’m getting too old
to ride horses,
but can watch herds
of wild horses
in the West —
if they can keep
from getting caught
and made slaves out of;
they are the freest
of all horses,
like birds
who are the freest
of us all.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry
Spotted Pony
a pastel by Ethel Mortenson Davis
Filed under Art, Art by Ethel Mortenson Davis, Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry
The Weirding Storm is Published!
The Weirding Storm, A Dragon Epic has been published by Bennison Books. It is now available at amazon.com.
The U.S. Amazon address is:
The address for Bennison Books, a UK publisher, is: https://bennisonbooks.com.
I am hoping that anyone who purchases the book from Amazon, either U.S. or U.K. Amazon, will also review the book. That helps publicize it in the amazon universe.
I am really excited about this publication. Bennison Books publishes some of my favorite poets and to be part of their stable with one of the best books I have ever written gives me an euphoric feeling. I hope some of you will be willing to be transported to another world where dragons and humans still co-exist along with witches, warriors, and battles, to paraphrase Terence Winch, one of the U.S.’s greatest poets.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Published Books, The Dragon Epic, Thomas Davis
In the Time of the Black Snake
by Thomas Davis
an irrelgular sonnet
The buffalo come stomping, snorting, blowing.
The blizzard howls like old men throwing fits
Of rage against the way their bones are creaking
Into another year, arthritis stirring
Up aches so harsh their anger steals their wits.
Snow crusts on dark hides, slows their stamping, singing
Until the universe becomes a song
Protesting how long drills drill into earth,
Into the heart of who the peoples long
To be inside the spirit of their birth,
Inside the breaths that make them who they are,
A being on the earth made from the star-
Stuff spun into the dance against the snake,
The warriors singing as they stomp and shake.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis
Captured Memory
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
We are going
to a movie
in Minneapolis.
He spoke.
Brokeback Mountain
is showing,
he grinned.
A willing mother,
surrounded by a sea
of young men,
A twinkling
In his eye —
a captured memory
in a wind of thoughts.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry
Here We Breath In Sky and Out Sky
Ethel has published yet another new book Here We Breathe In Sky and Out Sky. It should be available shortly on amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com.
You can purchase it today at http://www.lulu.com/shop/ethel-mortenson-davis/here-we-breathe-in-sky-and-out-sky/paperback/product-23134037.html. Reviews of the book are also appreciated. On the back cover the book is described in this way:
This is Ethel Mortenson Davis’s fourth book of poetry. The poems in this book are intense, filled with the magic light of New Mexico, imagistic in the same sense that H.D.’s and Ezra Pound’s early poetry was imagistic, spiritual, and transcendent. The visual nature of the poems relates to Davis’s skill as an artist trained at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. This nature also brings alive the high desert, mountain, and cliff country in which the poetry was written. The people that appear in the poems are multi-cultural, Navajo, Zuni Pueblo, and Anglos, that are living lives made complex by the long, sometimes difficult, history of New Mexico. There is a magic sense of New Mexican light in this book, and always a sense of here we breathe in sky and out sky.
I hope some of you will consider purchase a paperback copy.
Filed under Art, Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry, Published Books
Beyond the Fire of Stars
by Thomas Davis
Words crawl, or dance, or hurl into the air,
And as their meanings symphony
A universe born from complexity
Derived from how we humans try to bear
The waves of minutes marching unaware
Toward an ocean that no one can see,
Life crawls and dances, hurls its vibrancy
Past any time of hope or bleak despair.
As thin as paper deep with crawling words,
We dance and hurl ourselves into our world
As life swirls time into the thoughts we are
And consciousness, like sparkling hummingbirds,
Discerns, then speaks of times and meanings curled
Into eternities beyond the fires of stars.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis
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