Estella Lauter is out with a new review of Ethel Mortenson Davis’s latest book, The Woman and the Whale. Dr. Lauter was the Chair of the English Department at the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh and is considered a major scholar, having published two critical analysis books by major university presses. She is also the author of several books of poetry and is a former Door County Poet Laureate, receiving that among several other honors.
Category Archives: Poetry
The Old Snake
By Thomas Davis
I’ve been considering the old snake lately. You know,
the one that got humanity thrown out of the Garden of Eden.
He, I wouldn’t call him an “it”,
convinced Eve that humans would become like God
if only they would eat of the fruit of knowledge.
When Eve ate, Adam followed,
and the two of them left the Garden feeling naked.
Our current old snake is rather pedestrian comparatively.
He believes he has been divinely blessed,
but God doesn’t really come into that.
What he seems to really want,
as he sort of said,
is for the world’s leaders to come and “kiss my ass.”
To achieve his goal,
he throws tariffs around like confetti
and then partially pulls them back,
crowing Victory! Victory!
while the leaders kowtow to him, buying time,
while they work behind his back
to reorder the world in a way
that benefits him and hurts the clown
that will always be a threat to him
as long as he’s able to spit poison
into the lives they have expected to live.
Snakes slither on the ground
while lifting their heads up in the air, of course,
so, our old snake doesn’t see what’s happening,
not really. He’s blessed.
In the meantime,
the richest country in the history of the world
faces the dystopian nightmare
our old snake has said we’re already living inside,
stoking grievance and division up as strongly as he can.
Those that have bitten into his apple
bless his blessedness,
and the rest of us keep looking around,
wondering how anyone can claim
the country’s strengths are a flaming mass of disaster
even as we are being overwhelmed by the disasters
the old snake is gleefully making.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis
The Great Bear
By Thomas Davis, after reading a poem by Standing Feather
I saw the great bear in the forest,
noisily rambling through the brush.
Myths were flaking off black fur
and floating into the air
as eternity kept receding into the sky
just out of reach of what was floating
upward, away from the bear.
The sky darkened, daylight to dusk,
dusk to a night sky
flowing silver with the Milky Way overhead,
the song of the stars a silence
spread over the earth in glory.
Then I saw the bear in the sky,
small points of stars,
once a beautiful maiden
that angered the goddess Hera,
now a constellation shining in the heavens.
The forest danced,
trees shadows lengthened by starlight,
leaves and branches fluttered
as the night wind blew softly,
softly beneath the great bear
rambling overhead in the sky.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis
Putin’s Puppet Party (the PPP, used to be the GOP)
Thomas Davis
is on the roll of rolls.
I mean, tariffs are terrifying the world as Mr. Trump trumps his ego
with a paroxysm of actions that have Americans checking their wallets
and the rest of the world wondering who unlocked Pandora’s box this time.
But don’t worry,
Putin’s not worried.
Russia wasn’t hit with a single tariff.
After all, they haven’t signed on to the cease fire Mr. Trump said they’d sign,
and what’s happened?
The PPP has come out with excuses piled on excuses,
and the bombs have continued to blow up schools, hospitals, and power plants,
and Russian soldiers have continued to die
as they inch forward on Ukrainian soil,
and NATO is scared to death it’s collapsing
as Trump fumes about his allies and knows Putin is his best friend.
There was a time when the GOP was a stalwart against Communism.
The Red Menace was a plague that had to be stopped!
There was even a time when Dwight Eisenhower
stood as solid as a giant
and took on Facism worldwide and beat it
and then joined Churchill in decrying the evils of the Russian Empire.
I remember all that. Don’t you?
Eisenhower was once the President and the leader of the GOP.
But that’s old history now.
The PPP is in charge.
They have the majority in the Senate and the House of Representatives,
and Mr. Trump won a landslide by the skin of the skin of his teeth,
although he denies the latter part of that statement—
and don’t worry.
The stock market is collapsing,
a recession, or maybe stagflation, that strange beast, is around the corner,
and the entire world wonders what kind of new enemy has arisen in the west,
but the PPP is assuring us we can trust in Trump.
After all, Mr. Putin says we can.
I tell you, the PPP, even as it repeats endlessly strings of lies,
never leads anyone astray!
Filed under I ought to go eat worms, poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis
Hayes Lewis
Too many of the great American Indian leaders in education are passing. I keep mourning each one as they go beyond the blanket to where I cannot see. Thomas Davis
Hayes Lewis
I have been thinking about Hayes today,
How Agent Orange and his time in Viet Nam got him in the end,
But like all of us,
The ending is not the story,
Not the stone that has been shaped into a fetish
That means more than what it represents.
He was gentle, softspoken,
But the dreams he had!
He wanted to somehow reach into the spirit
Of every Zuni and American Indian child and young person
And stir alive with what they really are,
A blessing on the earth.
A gentle rain after weeks of unrelenting sun
That explodes the high desert into wildflowers,
Sun flowers, bee balm, Indian paintbrush,
The colors of life as bright as any rainbow.
As a Superintendent of Schools
He worked hard to stir up accomplishments
Inherent in spirits touched by the spirit
Of the Zuni heritage and history.
At the Institute of American Indian Arts
He worked to allow the creative fires
At the heart of who American tribal people are
To create a renaissance
So powerful it would wipe away
The foolish prejudices and preconceptions
Of those who still believe that Indian live in teepees
And have failed to join the contemporary world.
At A:shwi College he labored
To bring a college into being,
A tribal college that honored language, culture, and history
By bringing it alive,
Making it the heart of what learning should be.
But even this is only a little bit of what he was.
He has been one of those people
Who speak and people listen.
One of those people whose courage
Is not in their deeds alone,
But in the presence of how they hold themselves
As season passes season and days become a summation
Of all that is good and perfect upon the good earth.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis
The News About Ron His Horse Is Thunder
By Thomas Davis
In the midst of all the insanity in this country right now, yesterday I was sent news about one of the great leaders of the tribal colleges and universities movement in the United States and the World Indigenous Nations Higher Education movement worldwide.
I am walking through the wilderness.
Time has twisted on me.
I keep wondering who I am
as my hair grows white,
my bones ache more fiercely.
Ron His Horse Is Thunder is gone?
Gone where?
To the top of a tall mountain
where clouds of snow-dust blow
into a sky so blue
it’s not a dome but a song
that lasts forever and ever?
I imagine him lean as he rides a golden stallion
running with a herd of wild golden stallions,
his face alive with the spirit of Sitting Bull,
with the fire of the tribal colleges in his black hair
as it streams backward in the wind,
as the colleges bloom out of the prairie, in the deep woods, in the shadows of great mountains, in the high deserts, and beside the Pacific Ocean
into history, the meaning of history.
I could tell you stories.
How he became a tribal chairman
and then came to an AIHEC board meeting
where tribal college Presidents
treated him like a rock star,
cheering every time he took a breath.
How he walked out on a narrow runway in Albuquerque
dressed only in a loin cloth,
holding a spear as old as the stories
told around campfires on cold nights.
Dressed only in a loin cloth,
his legs and abs shining.
How he and I argued for a different funding stream
for the colleges as the eyes of Presidents glared
and linked us into visions
of a future where Native men and women
dance and sing as the drum of the future thunders
and wildflowers bloom every time a foot touches ground.
And now the news.
The old leaders, the beautiful people, my friends,
those who would sit in cheap motel rooms
and fiercely debate for hours
as they conjured alive a movement
that is changing history,
are fading, fading, fading.
The fire in their eyes,
the power of their gestures,
the song of their voices
disappearing, disappearing, disappearing.
And who will remember where they have walked?
Who will know the force of who they were?
They created a movement.
They fashioned it out of dreams,
out of old bar rooms and trailer houses
and abandoned buildings that should have been condemned.
They did! They did! All of them together!
And now,
an email. An email!
A technology that wasn’t invented yet
when the tribal colleges first came to be.
It says that Ron His Horse Is Thunder,
a man so glorious they put his glory
on national posters and posted them all over the country,
is gone.
Nothing more than that.
That’s what it says.
How can that possibly have any meaning at all?
I feel the wilderness around me,
time twisting,
my spirit feeling how it felt
whenever I heard Ron His Horse Is Thunder laughing.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis
Story Poems From a Western Colorado Boyhood
My newest book, Story Poems From a Western Colorado Boyhood, is out. I have been writing these stories for decades. Some are funny, others serious, some mythical in the sense that, though they really happened, they still touch the spirit of the mountains and high deserts of the West. The wonderful cover photo was taken by our son, Kevin Michael (Alazanto) Davis. We miss him.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis
The Woman and the Whale
By Ethel Mortenson Davis from her new book, The Woman and the Whale
The day was a day of celebration.
A small Right Whale stood vertical,
head out of the water,
straight up in the air,
his dorsal fins reaching like arms
toward the sky.
A woman diver
from a South Pacific Island
said the whale tried to tuck her
under his dorsal fin
when she interacted with him.
At first, she struggled to get away—
until she saw the shark
circling her, trying to get at her.
The whale kept his body between
the diver and the shark.
Then the whale grew agitated,
slapped his tail at the shark,
before finally running it off.
Today, the whale came back with his family,
many heads sticking straight up in the air.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry, Published Books
Looking for DEIs
by Thomas Davis
I’ve been looking around for DEIs,
But I haven’t found any yet.
I thought at first, they were like gremlins,
Little people-like creatures that mostly looked ugly.
I know they are black, brown, yellow, and woman,
But every black, brown, yellow, and woman I know
Wouldn’t answer to, “Come here, DEI,”
Any more than I would,
And anyway, even a gremlin
Wouldn’t crash a plane and helicopter
With seventy-six people on board,
Would they?
I thought about asking our congressman,
Or maybe our President,
To draw me a picture of a DEI
So I’d recognize one when I saw one,
But then I thought to myself,
What if they are a DEI hire in disguise?
Can’t anybody paint themselves up
as a white Christian man?
What then?
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis, Uncategorized
After Bucha, Ukraine
By Thomas Davis
Bucha was known as Ukraine’s Switzerland. Now it is synonymous with unimaginable horror.
Charles McPhedran, Mother Jones Magazine
I keep imagining Yevtushenko on a Moscow stage in 1961,
young, eyes bright, arms flailing, his pacing energy
exploding into a wild, deep voice
as he declaims about Babi Yar and Stalin’s evil
as Jewish bodies decayed in an unmarked ravine in Ukraine.
I keep seeing the Russian crowd,
glittering sophistication,
stunned at first and then roaring
as poetry stirs in the Russian soul
and reminds them that Stalin, the Tsars,
the years when peasants struggled for survival,
the siege of the Nazis at Stalingrad
were the past, never to be repeated.
Inside that image, I keep sensing
the old Russian bear stirring,
shapeshifting, growling old resentments
into bombs that explode into apartment buildings
and schools and maternity wards
where new-born babies and their mothers
lie screaming as walls shudder and fall.
And I keep wondering if it is Russians
rising out of their history into rage—
or if the Russians are humankind
attacking, attacking, attacking
all life on earth out of history and insatiable greed.
“Blood is flowing,
spreading across the floors,” Yevtushenko wrote.
“And I, myself,
am one massive, soundless scream
above the thousand thousand buried here.”
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis
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