a pastel by Ethel Mortenson Davis
Category Archives: 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
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
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