I just posted two sonnets and then the latest issue of The Lyric arrived in the mail. The Lyric is the oldest magazine dedicated to traditional verse forms in the North America. Its website can be found at https://thelyricmagazine.com. My Shakespearean sonnet, “A Lover’s Song,” which was written to Ethel several years ago, is in the new issue. I subscribe to the magazine and have had another sonnet published in it about a year ago.
Category Archives: Poetry
The Miracle Inside a Storm from Hell Inside the Turning Wheels of Time
Sonnets by Thomas Davis
The Miracle Inside a Storm from Hell
Their misery growing as they splashed through streams
And felt huge clouds above the battered trees
That flung down branches as the sorceries
Of wind and hunger screamed and screamed, and screams
Into their fears, their hatred, useless dreams
The Preacher cultivated with an ease
That wasn’t true, not when the miseries
Of hell danced in the storm’s wild, fierce extremes.
And then, as if inside a miracle,
They reached a lonely church, the raging storm
So fierce they quailed inside its crucible,
And knew the light of God, their spirits warm,
The dreams the Preacher preached so lyrical
It made them feel, inside their hell, reborn.
Inside the Turning Wheels of Time
Inside the rhythm of the wagon’s wheels,
The Preacher, with his people crammed beside
Him underneath a false floorboard, untied
His consciousness from who he was, ordeals
He’d face for years now in the past, and reels
Of rainbow light exploded, amplified
A vision where he felt Ezekiel’s tide
Of prophecies burn like a fire that heals.
He saw his Promised Land, boats filled with fish,
A land of gardens lush as men could wish,
And in the garden of his vision, black
As midnight skies, a shining Adam spoke
A chant so sibilant with grace the almanac
Of hours turned like the wagon wheel’s spokes.
Note: These two sonnets continue the series that constitute the beginnings of chapters in a book on a black community that existed on Washington Island before the coming of the Civil War. These sonnets are part of the sequence that deals with the escape of people from the community from the plantations where they were enslaved. The sonnets are written using a mixture of sonnet forms. “The Miracle Inside a Storm from Hell” is a Spenserian sonnet. “Inside the Turning Wheels of Time” is a French sonnet.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis, Uncategorized
Door
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
There,
in the bright morning,
hepatica,
whose leaves stay alive
under the dead layer
all winter,
send up flowers
before all others.
It is here where
the pale pink and lavender
are the door opening
to where my god lives:
Her angels are the birds
opening their wings.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry
Publications
Ethel and I continue to have success at getting poems published. We both had poems in this year’s Wisconsin Poets Calendar: http://www.wfop.org/poets-calendar-1/2016-poets-calendar. We got our copies when we went to the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets fall convention in Madison, Wisconsin this weekend. Door County Living Magazine released an article Gary Jones, a fine poet in his own right who had a poem in the last release of the Blue Heron Review that also included a poem by Ethel, wrote at https://doorcountypulse.com/spirits-born-light-poet-tom-davis. At the end of the article the magazine published a Miltonian sonnet I wrote called “Cherry Orchard.”
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis, Uncategorized
Two Sonnets: Washington Island’s Black Community
by Thomas Davis
Like Moses in the Wilderness
Like Moses fleeing from the Pharaoh’s wrath
Before the miracle of waters parting,
The Preacher blazed a trail on freedom’s path
As fear possessed their endless fleeing.
What was that man or woman really seeing
That passed them while they tried to run and hide?
What accident of fate would send them running
When slavers found them tired and terrified?
The Preacher prayed away grim miles and tried
To make their spirits testify that dreams
Are greater than the fear that crucified
Their faith that they could get across the streams
And past the towns that blocked their way and threatened
To let the slavers pounce and leave them bludgeoned.
The Bridge that was a Wall
The bridge, inside the night, was like a wall,
Small, wooden, unassuming, houses dark
Beside a path that seemed to be a call
To all who needed passage to embark
Upon a journey to the river’s other side.
They hid in brush, mouths dry, dread strong enough
To make them sick, and, silently, wide-eyed,
Saw spectres armed with whips and iron cuffs
Stand shining where they’d have to cross the bridge
Without disturbing dogs or waking up
The people in the houses as the ridge
Beyond the river beckoned past the interrupt
That stood between their anxious dreams and where
Their breaths would feel God’s freedom in the air.
Note:
These two sonnets continue the long series that tells the fictional story of the people of a black community that actually lived on Washington Island in the 1850s before unexpectedly disappearing. Two sonnets from this series were posted earlier.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis
Flight
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
In memory of Donald Sharp and Rumi
Was it the spring stream,
flowing out of the escarpment
tumbling, bubbling over fallen birch trees?
Or was it the large, sloppy snowflakes
falling in the spring morning’s forest,
as trees held their breath,
held their breathing
for the sun to overtake the cold,
that made my wings open and close,
readying me to take flight?
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry
Tom’s new sonnet in The Road Not Taken
The new issue of The Road Not Taken, a Journal of Formal Poetry has just published one of my sonnets, “Spreading Wings.” You canhttp://journalformalpoetry.com, then click on the Spring 2016 issue and scroll down. Since both of our daughters, Sonja and Mary, were present at the poetry reading at the Reader’s Loft Bookstore in Green Bay (http://www.houseofthetomato.com/march), I read this Italian sonnet there. The sonnet is about them when they were young. I wrote it during an extremely terrifying time in Ethel’s and my life when Kevin, our 27 year old son, was in the process of dying from cancer. Writing sonnets (I wrote 44 in all) was the only way I could bear what Ethel, I, and, of course, Kevin most of all, were going through. What concerned me day after day was our family and remembering incidents that made up the substance of our lives as a family. This sonnet tells of a time that I remember with great love in my spirit.
Raising children is not always easy, but I like to think that at least part of what Ethel and I have achieved in life is the way our two daughters have reflected into our granddaughters and grandsons. They both are beyond outstanding parents, always willing to sacrifice so that their children can meet whatever promise they have in life. I am also convince that they are great teachers because of the spirit they have inculcated from the time they were toddlers, dancing through life with a verve that gives no quarter to a universe that is not always kind.
I hope those of you who go to read the sonnet will enjoy it.
Filed under Poetry, Thomas Davis, Uncategorized
by Thomas Davis
Inflamed Imagining: Freedom
Inside the swamp, beside a cypress tree,
White herons in the water, bullfrog croaks
A symphony as dusk, as stealthily
As cat’s feet stalking small, shy birds, evokes
The coming night, the Preacher slowly stokes
The fire blazed in his heart and starts to sing
Songs powerful enough to loosen yokes
White masters forged through endless menacing.
The words he’d use burned deep; he felt their sting
And saw his spirit fire alive in eyes
Awake to dreams, inflamed imagining
Of days spent free beneath glad years of skies.
The darkness deepened underneath the tree.
He’d preach, he thought, then, later on, they’d flee.
Freedom’s First Night, Before Dawn
A Miltonian Sonnet with Two Coda
The white man, with his wide brimmed hat and face
Stunned pale inside a night that breathed with sounds
From woods they’d passed through in their frantic race
Against the coming dawn, turned back around
To look toward the barn that loomed ahead
Of where six families hid in scratchy brush.
He sighed as if he couldn’t flee the dread
He felt in dark before dawn’s first red blush.
“I made a space to hide you runaways,”
He said. He turned again and looked at eyes
That looked at him, cold fear a noxious glaze
Infecting even how the dreaded sun would rise.
“Six families can’t escape at once,” he said.
“I’ve got my family too. They’re still in bed.”
The Preacher looked into the man.
His eyes looked past white outer flesh
Into the place his soul began.
The white man turned again, the mesh
Of eyes surrounding him afraid
To move, to dream, to think they’d leave
This place before their master flayed
Their spirits, made their spirits grieve.
Note: I’ve included two sonnets from my series on Washington Island’s black community that existed in the 1800s here. I’ve posted others in the series earlier, although they were not written originally in a chronological order, so they represent how they are written, not how they should appear. I didn’t know what I was doing at first. However, the owner of the Fair Isle Bookstore on Washington Island convinced me to write a book about the 1800s black community since no books on that topic exist. I thought about it, did some research, found some primary source documents, but they were not enough to produce a non-fiction work. This series of sonnets began to expand. Then I started writing a novel, which is in progress, with a sonnet ahead of each chapter. These are the first two chapter heading sonnets in the novel.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis, Uncategorized
House of Tomato Post of Thomas and Ethel Mortenson Davis’s Green Bay Reading
The House of Tomato website, developed by Tori Grant Welhouse, one of Wisconsin’s most important poets, a graduate of Antioch University London, and the Vice President for the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets in northeast Wisconsin, has posted a podcast from the poetry reading Ethel and I did in Green Bay on Thursday at the Reader’s Loft Bookstore. The website address is http://www.houseofthetomato.com/march for those who might be interested.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis, Uncategorized
Ladies Need Fur Coats
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
She went to the great black first,
then the bay.
She had carrots
in one of her coat pockets.
“Which pocket?” she asked.
Their soft muzzles always
found the right one,
happy to munch the carrots.
Then one day
the black was gone,
his stall cleaned out,
and shovels put in his place.
“Where’s Dick?” she asked.
“He went to the fox farm because
ladies need fur coats,” he said.
The bay remained for
a number of years,
sleeping in the winter sun
with his head too low to the ground.
Then one day the bay too
was gone,
his great body and his work
folded into the fields
outside his window.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry, Uncategorized
fourwindowspress 