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.
Category Archives: Poetry
Captured Memory
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
Men Have Had Their Way With Her
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
It’s been too long
since we last talked.
I must tell you
that men have had
their way with her.
She is hurt and sick,
but keeps giving us gifts,
ignoring their torture
and disrespect.
Today she surprises us
with the white hares.
They hop over each other
making giggling sounds,
laughing at the prairie grasses.
She gives the spring rain
that coaxes green buds.
Soon we will plant
tomato and egg plants.
She gives us seeds to sprout,
not darkness, nor pain,
nor death.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry
Nature’s Implacable Force
by Thomas Davis
In North Dakota’s winter frost drives deep
Into the ground, soils compacted tight
Until, in spring, the ground heaves, water seeps
Into the soils, and land begins to write
The story of another spring, the slow,
Implacable force nature heaves and cracks
Into the manmade things, the bravado
Of buildings, pipelines, streets, steel railroad tracks.
Inside an empty field an apple tree
Has grown into the crumbling of a farm.
It stands where once a lively family
Built walls to keep them safe and free from harm.
This pipeline will not ever fail, they say.
It won’t leak. Not a minute. Not a day.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis
An Elder’s Prayer
by Thomas Davis
They frack the earth. Drills fly into the soil
And whirl through rock, a stream of chemicals
Shot down into the shale, the oracles
Of business, profit, subjugation, oil
Enraptured by technology, the coil
Inside the engine driving humankind,
The writ of progress, greed, force sealed and signed.
The oilmen say, we need the fracked-up oil.
An elder walks into the winter cold
And kneels beside a frozen lake and lifts
His arms toward dark clouds, his spirit bold
Enough to recognize creation’s gifts.
“The radiance of water, soil, and sky,”
He sang. “Is in a baby’s first-breath cry.”
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis, Uncategorized
Gray-White Geese
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
Put your arms around me
to keep the desert winds
from blowing through me.
Now!
As the snow clouds have gathered
like gray-white geese
gathering on water.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry
Shiva’s Dancing
by Thomas Davis
Ben Naga published a short poem on his blog, https://bennaga.wordpress.com:
SHIVA’S DANCING
Inhale thyme, the spice of life
Dance the music of rhythm
A tapestry woven through
Time and space in harmony
I responded with free verse:
And inside Orion, where gas the size of planets spit
out of a black hole’s enormous yaw,
and where incubators blaze suns out of what seems light,
but is really reactors coalescing into the splitting of nuclei,
Shiva went walking.
As he walked he felt, rather than saw, the forces of destruction
annihilating into the forces of creation,
and the foment caused by his walking and his thoughts
inside a place generating the growth of a galaxy
let him sit on the side of a mountain in the Himalayas
as a snow leopard and two spotted cubs
leapt from a ledge of old ice
toward a cliff face where mountain goats danced with dark hooves away
into clouds descended from heaven.
Ben Naga responded to that by saying, I like the poem. So full of powerful imagery. Should I challenge you to tame this outpouring into a sonnet?
I responded:
Shiva’s Dancing
Gas from a black hole’s yaw hurled massively
To deep, deep space. In Orion suns blazed
Out from the incubator galaxy,
New stars a coalescing plasma raised
From clouds of light as Shiva walked
In nothingness and felt unraveling
Annihilate into creation as he stalked
Through dances of light’s christening.
Upon a Himalayan mountaintop
He sat. Snow leopards, muscling with grace,
Leapt from a ledge of ice, the yawing drop
Below them sheer, a cliff’s dark, rocky face.
Two mountain goats danced, dark with hooves, away
Into a cloudy heaven’s roiled ballet.
One thing links to another, then causes a reaction that has, somehow, the definition of creativity inside it.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis
Publications by Ethel Mortenson and Thomas Davis
Both Ethel and Thomas have had recent publications. Ethel’s poem, “Love Songs,” one of the best poems she has written that has not found its way to publication until now, has just been published by Bramble, the new literary magazine of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets (WFOP), at http://www.wfop.org/love-songs. Bramble (http://www.wfop.org/bramble-lit-mag) is a new effort by WFOP, and this is its first issue. The poems in the first issue are well worth reading.
Tom has just had a sonnet published in Ariel Anthology 2016, Inward and Outward, “Of Those Who Could End the World — So There Osama bin Laden, ISIS, and the Archbishop of Treves!” This is the third year his sonnets have been published in Ariel, which is arguably the best anthology published in Wisconsin. This year’s anthology also contains two black and white drawings by Ethel, “Electric Horse” and “Night Sounds.” Ariel can be ordered online at https://www.amazon.com/Ariel-Anthology-2016-Inward-Outward.
Tom also had two children’s poems published in an anthology by Brick Street Poetry, Inc., Words & Other Wild Things. The poems were “Milk Maid” and “The Fisherman.” The anthology can be ordered online at https://www.amazon.com/Words-Other-Things-Street-Poetry.
Filed under Art by Ethel Mortenson Davis, Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis
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