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.
Category Archives: Thomas Davis
Tom’s new sonnet in The Road Not Taken
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
In the Unsettled Homeland of Dreams
The Preacher sat upon a rocky hill
Above a cave where waters from the lake
Crashed angrily above the soaring shrill
Of gulls excited by a splashing wake
Of fish caught by the afternoon’s harsh light
Flashed back into the early Fall’s blue sky.
He sat upon the hill, his second sight
Unmoored and wild, and listened as the lie
He’d told himself when struggling to find
The island where his people could be free
Wrapped round reality, the awful bind
Of white men, dark men in the company
Of humankind, their kind, the hunger spun
From dreams once dreamed beneath a noonday sun.
Note: The title paraphrases a line from Pablo Neruda. This is the fourth sonnet in the series I am writing about the black community that existed for a short while on Washington Island off the tip of Door County. It was developed during a workshop led by Ralph Murre.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis
Spirit Born of Light
To Donald Sharp
By Thomas Davis
A rain of sunshine through the tattered clouds –
And then he stands there speckled by the light.
A man not yet a child, his spirit crowds
It’s way into a pulsing song in flight
Across the years of heartbeats pumping blood,
Light shining in his eyes, his voice more sky
Than earth, his presence like a dancing flood
Of sunflower gold stirred by a breeze’s sigh.
Born in a rain of light, he travels trails
Where thunderclouds are luminous with storm
And even pain, mortality’s travails,
Are metamorphosed to a time-bound form
Of breath exhaling light into a field
Where spirit born of light becomes life’s yield.
Filed under Poetry, Thomas Davis
Crutches
by Thomas Davis
My middle brother Gary died of cancer while I was in Grand Junction, Colorado to see him one last time a couple of weeks ago. This is a difficult free verse poem to publish in wordpress because of its long line, but I wanted to publish it in his honor. The story itself really happened.
Nights in hospital rooms were over:
Antiseptic smells, constant pain, medicine that took you from
yourself, fluorescent lights, a bed that cranked up and down.
Now Gary, my brother, and I were sitting on the car porch,
his foot in a cast, agonizing nights of pain behind him,
my leg in a cast so uncomfortable I could hardly move.
“Hunting season starts today,” Gary noted with understated
nonchalance.
“Yeah,” I said, “and we’re stuck here in these casts.”
Gary pointed at the jeep sitting in the driveway.
It hadn’t been driven for two months.
“In the hospital Jim Fennell told me hunting’s pretty good
around Paonia,” he said.
“He came to see me after he left you.”
“And how do we get to Paonia?” I asked. “I can’t clutch and step
on the gas.
We only have two good legs between us.”
Gary looked speculatively at the jeep. “But we have two good
legs,” he said.
“Hunting season started at dawn,” I said, knowing I wasn’t
saying anything.
“If we left now we could get up there a little after noon,” Gary
replied.
I reached for my crutches. He was holding his crutches.
Three minutes later we were in the jeep mimicking driving with
two good legs.
I stepped on the clutch; Gary stepped on the gas.
We decided that if we had to stop quick we’d let the engine die
as I braked.
Otherwise we’d work it out.
Thirty minutes later we were hauling happily out of Orchard Mesa
toward Delta,
rifles in the back seat, and sure we were going to get a couple
of bucks
even though climbing a hill was tantamount to ending up in the
emergency room.
At Fool’s Hill, named for those who’d slid off the highway into
empty space,
a coyote loped onto the road and stopped, looking calmly at the
jeep.
As I swerved, Gary took his foot off the gas and touched the
brake.
We swung around the fool animal sweet as you please.
Neither of us could stop congratulating each other on our
driving skill.
By the time we’d come to the Paonia turnoff, we were getting
tired,
and I was wondering what we thought we were doing.
Neither of us had been out of the hospital a week,
and the kitchen table note we’d left
was bound to get Mom so agitated Dad would be in the Ford
driving like a mad man toward where we said we were going.
Gary was manic, though. Hunting season was open.
Nobody could keep us down.
From Paonia we started up into the hills on a boulder filled
dirt track.
Three miles from pavement we pulled into a meadow exhausted.
Clutching, shifting, leg-reaching, hand and arm coordination
caused by two teenagers doing one teenager’s job wasn’t working.
Once the jeep had stopped we sat in our seats
and stared at the country where we found ourselves,
five miles from where our note said we’d be.
Where we were was a nightmare for two boys
who still hadn’t figured out how to carry rifles
swinging across uneven ground on crutches.
Surrounding the small meadow where we’d parked,
hills were littered with stone shelves and thickets of scrub oak.
After a minute Gary said, “Looks like good deer country to me,”
and he was out of the jeep, figuring out how he was going to
carry his 30.06.
Back home we’d managed by pressing the gun butt against the
crutch
and slowly making our way to the jeep.
But we couldn’t hold gun and crutches that tight while climbing.
At last Gary unbuckled his belt and tied the rifle to his right
crutch.
An hour later, hurting so bad neither of us could stand the pain,
we had climbed our first hill and were staring at a small wash
snaked through twisted slopes, a nightmare of rock and brush.
I sat down and looked at the anguish on Gary’s face.
Why had I been so eager to go along with a fool idea?
Wasn’t I the oldest? Shouldn’t I have been the one with good
sense?
Then Gary’s face lit up, and he grinned as if he’d hit the
world’s biggest jackpot.
He bent down to unstrap the 30.06 from his crutch.
A two point buck walked out of scrub oak in the wash below us
and stood looking at where we were standing.
I wasn’t prepared for the shot when Gary fired.
I slid off the sloping rock where I was sitting and found myself
with my leg higher than my head with no idea how I was going to
get myself
back up on the rock so that I could leverage to my feet.
Gary started shouting like a mad man: “I got it!” he yelled. “I
got it!”
He’d shot the buck?
The thought dimly forced itself through my dilemma.
How were we going to get the buck, our rifles, and ourselves out
of the wash, up the hill, down the hill, and into the jeep
so we could drive home?
How were we going to drive home when we were both on our last
legs?
I stared at Gary, watched him hobble through a victory dance,
and thought, “Damned you’ve been stupid, Tom.”
Then, leg throbbing and burning up in my cast, I maneuvered to
my feet.
“Come on, Tommy,” Gary said. “Let’s get this sucker and then go
out and get you one!”
I stared at my brother. Who was he anyway?
“How are we going to carry a buck out of here?” I asked.
Gary looked at me, startled. “We’ll drag it,” he said.
“Won’t do the hide any good, but I got my buck first day of
hunting season.”
“Have you figured out how we’re going to get into the wash?” I
asked.
“Why should I worry about that?” Gary shot back, clearly puzzled.
“We just get down there, put a rope around the buck, and drag it
out.”
“Your foot hurt?” I asked.
He shot me a look of pure malice.
“Of course my foot hurts,” he snarled. “So does your leg.”
He looked at the sky. “Sunset will be here before we get back to
the jeep.”
I didn’t say anything, but put crutches beneath arm pits
and started struggling through thick brush.
Once we got into the wash I strained to hold dead weight high
enough
for Gary to tie rope around the buck’s neck.
Then Gary tied the rope around his waist and started making his
way up the hill.
An hour and a half later, sun going down, I had the rope around
my waist.
Gary wasn’t talking anymore. Sheer guts and pain had silenced
him.
I’d suggested we give up and leave the buck for later,
but he’d gotten so upset I thought he might start hitting me,
so we struggled, fighting uphill until we could see the jeep.
Then I carefully put crutches downhill as far as I dared,
planted points into ground and dragged downward,
cussing silently at pain, my idiocy, and my stupid, stupid
brother.
When Dad finally came up the dirt road, headlights on,
he parked and heard us shouting.
He climbed the hill, took one look at Gary, then me, then the
buck,
then shook his head and said, “You two.”
Without another word he untied the rope from my waist,
grabbed the buck’s horns, hoisted it onto his shoulders,
and carried it toward the jeep.
Off the hill he looked at the jeep, catching his breath,
and said, “We’ll take the car home. We’ll get the jeep tomorrow.”
Gary fell asleep before we’d gotten off the dirt road.
Dad winced every time the car crept over a boulder and scraped
its frame.
He kept silent so long I couldn’t stand silence any longer.
“I was a damned fool,” I said at last. “I shouldn’t have gotten
us in this mess.”
Dad didn’t say anything for a long time.
Silence ached with recriminations and regret.
“At least you left a note,” he said at last. “A wise man always
leaves a note.”
We turned off the dirt road toward Paonia.
I squirmed in my seat and wondered how Gary could sleep through
his pain.
In the hospital I’d heard him wake up screaming in the middle of
the night.
Then the car tire’s humming weighed down eyelids, and I fell
asleep,
knowing a man ought to do more than “leave a note” in life.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis
Metamorphisis
by Thomas Davis
I lay beside an ancient, quiet pool
and put my idle hand into the water.
A rainbow trout swam nibbling past.
Without a thought I held its thrashing fast.
The trout became a whiskery, wily otter.
I squeezed as if I’d turned into a ghoul
whose only thought was how to hold
an otter in my thrall forevermore.
The otter twisted like a fiend,
and when that failed, it bared sharp teeth and screamed.
My spirit quailed and heart turned icy cold.
Between two breaths the eagle was a child.
He looked at me and slowly, sadly smiled.
I dropped her when her human voice began to sing.
I looked into the shine of golden eyes;
the child became a woman beautiful and wise.
The woman turned and swiftly swam away.
I jumped into the pool, but she was gone —
And now I’ve spent these many years
bedazzled by an otter with a woman’s face,
Ensorcelled by a quiet water place.
Filed under poems, Thomas Davis
Incident on Washington Island
After the Civil War
a Miltonian Sonnet with a Double Coda
by Thomas Davis
As Ambrose Betts gulped down the whiskey shot
That Gullickson had given him, his face
Was flushed, the muscles in his neck a knot
So tight he winced, his outrage out of place
Inside the cabin’s half lit single room.
“A Winnebago brave! I tell you Gullickson,”
He said. “As large as life inside the gloom
Of Miner’s kitchen, Bullock looking drawn,
As if he’d seen a ghost, as black as coal.
I’ve never seen the like before!” he yelled.
“An Indian, white man, black man like a shoal
Of pebbles on a beach. The Indian held
His hand up, said, I swear, to Bullock, “You,”
He said. “The first white man I ever knew.”
“Old Bullock, black as night,
Smiled with those teeth of his
So dazzlingly bright white
My head began to fizz.
“And Miner looked like God
About to haul back, smack
The Indian into sod.
A white man that is black!”
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis
“By God, They’re Protecting Salamanders Rather Than Human Beings!”
comment heard in a restaurant in Sturgeon Bay Wisconsin
by Thomas Davis
An Italian Sonnet
When Darwin saw gradation in a finch
That flits about Galapagous[1], he saw
One species modified in beak and claw
By choices made adapting to the flinch
Of circumstances born out of the wrench
Of geologic time, the pitch and yaw
Of land and ocean, weather systems raw
With winds that shape the land that rainstorms drench.
But in his old age earthworms sang the song
That sirened through the studies that he did[2],
The deaf and blind regurgitator dug
Into plain ground turned soil, the endless round
Of earth built by the living plows that slid
Fecundity out of the realm of slugs.
[1] Darwin traveled to the Galapagos Islands on a ship named Beagle where he developed the theory of evolution out of his observations of the gradations between a number of species, including a finch.
[2] Earthworms was Darwin’s last book, published on 10 October 1881, just six months before he died.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis
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