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.
Category Archives: Poetry
Gray-White Geese
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
The Reader
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
He has taken
his dinner with delight,
relishing each morsel,
tasting each bite
by rolling it
on his tongue.
He mouths the words,
forming them
on his lips,
smiling,
as he escapes
to his world —
the one called ecstasy.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry
Four Windows Press Publishes New Book by Ethel Mortenson Davis
Four Windows Press has published a new chapbook, The Healer, by Ethel Mortenson Davis:
These are powerful poems about healing and the human spirit by an imagistic poet of the first order. The book can be purchased for $10, via check or through PayPal to paypal.me/fourwindowspress, which covers all postage and handling. The Galleria Carnaval in El Morro, New Mexico, http://www.galleriacarnaval.com, also has copies at the gallery for sale. The address for checks is: Four Windows Press, Ethel Mortenson Davis, 231 N Hudson Ave., Sturgeon Bay, WI 54235. If you use PayPal please let us know by email, sending us your address, at http://www.davisetheltom@gmail.com.
Filed under Art, Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry
The Patriarchic Dark
by Thomas Davis
a sonnet from the Waterkeeper’s sonnet cycle
The old man stood inside the freezing dark
And watched the Indians in their makeshift camp.
He felt his age, an ancient patriarch
Who’s seen too much of living hard to tamp
The rage he felt into a discipline
The oilmen in their fancy suits and ties
Embraced each time their spokesmen put their spin
Upon the outrage in the Indian lies
That let them dance and sing and carry on
Their protests as the winter iced men’s blood
And civilization turned into a pawn
Of waterkeepers dredged from river mud.
Our Mother Earth, he sneered, then turned away.
The Law will win, he thought, and have its say.
Note: The Waterkeeper’s Sonnet Cycle is in honor of the protestors in North Dakota who are enduring harsh winter weather while still keeping their protest going. This is the second sonnet in the cycle published here.
Heaven
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
Heaven
An astronaut that repaired
the Hubble spacecraft
said recently
that when he stepped out
on his first spacewalk
and saw the lighted
blue and white earth
underneath him,
he knew
he was looking
at heaven.
I wonder how
we would have thought
of the land, the animals,
and the people
if we would have known
our earth was heaven?
If this was all the heaven
there will ever be?
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Photography, Poetry
Water Warriors
a sonnet by Thomas Davis
They danced, and then they sang, and on the plains
The winter came as men with guns and eyes,
That hated who they were, looked half insane
And tried to stop their dance and song, the pain
Engendered by the cold, their fears, dark skies,
Brave words that had the force of hurricanes.
But in the deepness of our Mother Earth,
The dance and song of waterkeepers stirred
An earth song, water song, a shining birth
Of human visions that were not deterred
By guns and eyes and human anger spurred
Alive by those whose sense of human worth
Could never see the dance or hear the earth-deep song
The drum-heart beats and beats all winter long.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis
Long Distance Runner II
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
“I run because it is my culture.”
“My father is not there for me
because he is a drunk.”
“The runners with me
are my family.”
“My culture says that I must greet
the sun by running.”
“I think about my future
when I am running.”
“I think about what my life
is going to be.”
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry
The Shore that No Man Sees
Thomas Davis
I sit upon the rocky lakeshore, waves
Long, curving lines that sweep and sing their music
Into the rhythms of my thoughts, their cryptic,
Moon-driven spirit a metaphor that graves
Itself into the thought that strikes me, raves
Unchecked into a day so wind-blown, gray,
It makes me wonder why the disarray
I feel inside seems dark, a chasmal cave.
Then, suddenly, I see the waves as souls
That sweep into a shore that no man sees,
And as they chant into the beach, the shoals
Of rocks become a shore of certainties,
An incantation on the shore, their canticle
Eternity, immersion mystical.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis, Uncategorized
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