Category Archives: Thomas Davis

January 5, 2013 · 7:39 am

The Kettle and the Stove

a children’s poem by Thomas Davis

“Well fellow old, my faithful friend,”
The kettle sighed as she began.
“We’ve cooked away until the end
And finally our long earned rest’s at hand.

“Sleep softly this black household night
And when bright morning trumpets in
We’ll wheeze and steam just like the light
And start our work all up again.”

“Oh yes,” the old stove answered her.
“The morning always seems to come.
The only thing is that I’m tired
And wish that all the endless work was done.”

“Oh yes,” the kettle wheezed and sighed.
“I know the feeling. Yes, I do.
Sometimes I get steamed up inside
And boil the silliest things. I do.

“Why, just today some tea was poured
Into my deepest inside part,
And I steamed up with salty tears
And salted tea down in my heart.”

“There, there,” the old stove gently said.
“Now don’t go getting steamed again.
My fires are cold and long since dead,
And sleep’s the thing that eases sin.”

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December 23, 2012 · 6:35 am

39. To War! And Raging Dragon Hearts!

a passage from The Dragon Epic by Thomas Davis

Above the earth, stars hard and bright against
The thin, cold blackness of the atmosphere,
Sshruunak felt faint from lack of oxygen.
The tug of gravity was powerful enough
To make him strain his wings to stay in flight,
And then he felt the weirding far below,
The swerve of history as rainbow light
Congealed into a dragon’s hardened scales
Around the heartbeat of a human girl.
From Mmirrimann an image filled with dread
And wonder seemed to dance before his eyes.
He felt outside the ganglia of minds
That sparked into connections buried deep
In dragon memories linked back to times
When solitary power filled the minds
Of dragons hid in solitary caves.

He felt a journeying that seemed outside
Of who he was, kaleidoscope of rage
Red-eyed, incensed that human brains could scurry
In bodies small as ants and still wrap him
With ropes that would not let him save himself.
He felt the memories of Mmirrimann
Begin to sing into the rainbow light
That haloed round his stratospheric flight…

And then, his self alive inside the old,
Dark dragon’s mind, the power surging out
Into connections not available
to younger dragons still involved in making
The self that would protect them from the songs
Miasma and the ancient memories
Could strike into a dragon’s hearts, Sshruunak
Exploded with a black, cold rage that slammed
Into the human woman linking him
And Mmirrimann, the human that had burned
An arrow deep into his eye, and humming
That throbbed from dragon spirits to a world
Upon the cusp of breaking from its egg
Into a newness never known before.

He felt the woman fall, saw the human evil
Beside a dragon in the snow fall down,
And heard the grumbling rage in Mmirrimann
Distract the ancient dragon from the light
Inside the field and force awareness, harsh,
To lock on Sshruunak’s seething bolt of rage.

As Mmirrimann’s awareness ricocheted
Back to Sshruunak, the younger dragon’s wings
Collapsed, and suddenly he fell as if
He’d lost what strength he had to have to fly.
He plunged toward the cold, hard mountain peaks,
His rage so great he could not make his wings
Flare outward, letting air support his weight
And finishing the free fall hurtling him
Toward a death he’d never contemplated.
He struggled as he fell and twisted, turned
Until, at last, he forced his wings to flare
Into the thickening of air as flight
Came back to him and let him feel control
And let him flatten out his flight above
The earth and let him feel alive again.

The line between the dragons in the field
And him was gone, and in its place he saw
He could not wait for night to start his war.
A miracle had caught cave dragons deep
Into a rainbow mesh they did not understand.
He could not let them extricate themselves
If he and all his followers were fated
To ever rid the earth of human evil.

He aimed toward the valley where black stones
Were charred with dragon fire and flew so swift
The air around him whistled from his flight.
The light was growing in the sky as shadows
Retreated from the slowly rising sun.
He shot his urgency into Stoormachen.

“The war has come!” he screeched inside his mind.
“We’ve got to make the war begin right now!”

Stoormachen startled from the shallow cave
He’d dug into the mountainside and looked
Into the sky to see Sshruunak’s black scales.
He seemed confused, unsure of what dark threat
Had changed the plans Sshruunak had drilled in him.

“We have to move!” Sshruunak repeated, wild
With edginess, afraid delay would end
Up ruining all the dreams he’d brewed inside
Since arrows buried fire into his eyes.
“The dragons and the humans are distracted.
The plans have changed. We’ve got to hurry! Move!”

Stoormachen spotted blackness in the sky,
Sshruunak’s flight swift enough to startle him.

The followers Sshruunak had gathered felt
A stirring in their spirits and their hearts.
They heard the urgency Stoormachen bleated
Into the mountain air and felt the fire
Of battle lust so suddenly inside
Their minds that they could barely see the boulders
Below them shining in the early sun.
They looked and saw Sshruunak’s wild flight and moved
Their wings to greet their leader’s urgency.
The time had come; the dragon’s legacy
Of fire and claws and mindless rage had come!
They watched Sshruunak plunge like a meteor
Into the valley’s eastern edge, his blackness
Contrasting vividly against blue skies.

“To war!” their leader roared. “To human death!
And fiery dragon flame and raging hearts!”

To listen to this passage, click on
To War! And Raging Dragon Hearts!

Note: This is the thirty-ninth passage of a long narrative poem, which has grown into The Dragon Epic. Originally inspired by John Keats’ long narrative poem, Lamia, it tells a story set in ancient times when dragons and humans were at peace. Click on the numbers below to reach other sections, or go to the Categories box to the right under The Dragon Epic. Click on Dragonflies, Dragons and Her Mother’s Death to go to the beginning and read forward. Go to The Mind’s Black Fire to read the passage before this one. To read the next passage in the epic, click on The Shock of Rage.

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December 15, 2012 · 8:13 am

Love Story

by Thomas Davis

For Ethel

The golden eagle, dark brown against deep blue of late spring sky,
Hovered, wings adjusting to wind currents.
In the cool canyon, beneath the ancient cottonwood tree
With its streaked white trunk,
Beside the stream shrinking from spring’s fullness,
We sat next to our picnic blanket.
The eagle dipped, then soared into a great arc
Toward, then over, sandstone canyon walls
Where years of rain had flowed over the canyon rim
And stained rock as it fell to where it fed the stream below.
That day was not our beginning.
Our beginning was in letters chained from Wisconsin to Colorado
As never-met poets began to explore what might come to be.

Where my poetry raged with fumbling working toward form,
Your poetry burned on the page,
Words boiled into images.
But in Unaweep Canyon on a day that seemed like it should last forever
We talked and began weaving invisible bonds
That show no signs of weakening
As we leave middle age and become elders
Visited by the pains of age and wear of time.
The moments of our lives together tremble,
Like the golden eagle’s wings:

Days spent learning the intensity of each other
As we walked Orchard Mesa’s huddled foothills,
The moon rising so deep an orange it was almost red,
Growing larger and larger
As it labored over the Prussian blue rim of Grand Mesa;
Tears coming to your eyes when you singed
The wedding dress you worked weeks to make
On the night before our wedding;
The long drive to Washington State’s Anacortes Island,
Possessions piled on top of an old car,
As we searched for life–
And then the even longer drive to Wisconsin
As we traveled over mountains,
Through orchards and fields of crops, deep into forests, across plains
Until we came, at last, to Lake Superior shining sunlight.

Then the birth of Sonja, Mary, and Kevin.
Tense waiting at hospitals
Until finally the joy of new life explodes;
The loneliness of a hospital room at night
While Mary struggles for breath inside a clear plastic bubble
As doctors fight an illness that seems to last forever;
The day when Kevin convulses
As doctors and nurses rush into his room
And force us into the hallway scared at not understanding.
Days spent walking to Lake Winnebago
Dragging a red wagon behind us
With Sonja talking ceaselessly while one,
Then the other, carries Mary in our arms.
The years of school and the search for a teaching job
Until, at last, we end up in a small Midwestern town
Working in an alternative school on the Menominee Reservation.

Life fills up with the details of living,
Moments of emotion:
Joy, anger, frustration, desperation, hope, sadness, grief, laughter,
A flowing that stretches into a landscape of bends and rocks and hills.

When we moved to Wisconsin Dells into the Gold Mine House
With its basement field stone floor and huge fireplaces,
Bald eagles sat with white heads and brown backs and breasts
Nearly every morning during winter and spring
In trees along the Wisconsin River,
Snow falling as one or another took wing off its pine perch
And soared into cold to look for open water.

A poem, or a hundred poems, cannot give life to either life or love.
Marriage begins, and time passes;
Children are born, and time passes;
Jobs are won or lost, and time passes;
Daughters and a son run through a million minutes
Of motion and meaning, and time passes;
Grandchildren are born and become blessings, and time passes…

Our lives spark against each other,
Spiraling out like skiers I remember one night in Aspen, Colorado
Who came down black mountains slopes
Carrying torches that glided and wove,
Suspended high above where I was standing, in the night sky.

And inside the passing of time a golden eagle still hovers above us
Beside a small stream
That sings as it flows over small shelves of sandstone
Until one morning we wake, and you grind fair trade coffee beans,
And we sit before a fire in the fireplace in New Mexico
That you say is good for our souls,
And we deal with the pains in your knee and my back,

And we try to understand each other
In the way we have always tried to understand each other,
Braiding our lives through moments when we are together.

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December 8, 2012 · 4:26 pm

38. The Mind’s Black Fire

a passage from The Dragon Epic by Thomas Davis

Inside her cottage, weary from the work
She’d done with all the other villagers,
Alone, the comfort of her rocking chair
Suffusing through the soreness in her bones,
She felt a sudden rush of fear and wonder
Infect her with a dread so powerful
It made her look around in panic.
She felt the dragons fleeing from their caves
And wondered if the war was suddenly
Reality, a monster wolfing human, dragon lives
And leaving devastation in its wake—

But then she saw Ruarther draw his bow
Upon a field of shining, endless ice
And saw his face dissolve into a mask
Of weird bewilderment, as if his life
Was ending as it spiraled on outside
The life he’d lived up to that moment’s instant.
Inside her sewing room she saw him drop
His bow and lose the madness that had made
Him find the witch’s child intending murder.
And then she saw him think of her, Ruanne,
And home and how he’d brought game home to help
The village live its life inside the forest
Where dire wolves came in winter and the dragons
Flew past so high they seemed mere colors specked
Upon the clearness of the endless skies.

But then she saw him stare into the whirling
Intensity of one great dragon’s eyes
And felt him turn away from where he’d lived
His life in honor, flinching from the shame
He felt at having worked obsessively
To kill a girl he’d never even seen.
She felt him kneel in snow and start to search
for where his spirit could find peace again
away from weirding spirit bears and dragons
and even her, the woman whom he loved.

How could she see him? Not through dragon eyes,
Ssuranne or Mirrimann, but through a cord
Of spirit sense that bound her heart to his
No matter how insane or evil he might be
In struggling against the demons fused
Into the human that he should have been.

She put her hand up to her mouth and let
A small cry echo through the sewing room.

But then she felt a sense of miracle
And fear inside the dragons spread across
The fields of snow outside the cottage where
The child Crayllon had brought into the world
Had lived beneath the dragon’s mountain caves.
What could she do? What should she do? The weirding
Was emanating waves of witch’s power
Into the dormant depths inside her spirit
And made her want to use the knowledge she
Had spent her life denying as the world
Swirled change and bridges to a place forbidden
Into a fabric never meant to be.

A black fire seared into Ruanne and bounced
Into Ruarther, ricocheting off
The shields he’d built when exorcizing forcefully
The spirit bear into Ssruanne whose eyes
Were drawn from Wei’s mutation up
Into the skies above the mountain peaks.
A recognition of Ruarther flared
With hate so toxic that it made Ruanne
Sink to her knees upon the cottage floor.
She felt the dragon up so high its lungs
Were straining for each breath, its flight a rage
Containing promised death for humankind.

Ssruanne’s mind blocked the fire that scorched Ruanne.
Surprised, Ruanne heard screaming blistering
Into the cottage’s small space and saw her door
Fly open as a half a dozen men
Came storming in to find out what was wrong.
The last man in was Cragdon whose pale face
Grew paler when he saw how Ruanne looked.

He gasped, “the dragon!” Then collapsed as if
He’d felt the black fire sizzling Ruanne.

“What’s wrong?” a worried Reestor ordered, voice
Commanding, filled with panicked dread.

The men around her looked like spirit beasts,
Their faces wavering with spirit light.
As Ruanne tried to find normality,
Bright rainbows seemed to dance before her eyes
And dragon voices sang their humming songs
Into a universe no longer like
Reality that made life possible.

What could she do? she asked. What should she do?
She looked at Reestor, eyes so bright
They seemed as powerful as dragon eyes.
Outside a crowd had gathered, wondering,
Had Ruanne sensed that war and death was cusped
Upon the flight of coming dragon wings?

Ruanne held Reestor’s eyes and fought
To force the black fire and its burning hatred
Out of her mind into the wilderness
Around the village, but she felt the dragon
Above the earth turn from its climbing flight
Into a hurtling toward the peaks
Where other dragons waited in the snow.

To listen to this passage of the epic, click on The Mind’s Black Fire.

Note: This is the thirty-eighth passage of a long narrative poem, which has grown into The Dragon Epic. Originally inspired by John Keats’ long narrative poem, Lamia, it tells a story set in ancient times when dragons and humans were at peace. Click on the numbers below to reach other sections, or go to the Categories box to the right under The Dragon Epic. Click on Dragonflies, Dragons and Her Mother’s Death to go to the beginning and read forward. Go to The Song of Becoming a Dragon to read the passage before this one. To read the next section, click on The Mind’s Black Fire

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December 1, 2012 · 9:01 am

The Catfish River

a children’s poem by Thomas Davis

The catfish river starts,
Snorts with a small ripple of foam,
And then goes to sleep again.

The afternoon is covered with sky,
The blue cloth creeping into cradles of stone
And covering dark shallows.

The catfish river rolls over,
Swells with an oily, gray, collapsing wave,
And then goes to sleep again.

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November 25, 2012 · 7:59 am

37. The Song of Becoming a Dragon

By Thomas Davis, a passage from what has become The Dragon Epic

Wei felt the light around her, felt her bones
And flesh expanding out toward the light.
She heard Ssruanne, above her changing, saw
The golden old one stretch her claws to land,
But could not pay attention to the voice
That called to her, her flesh becoming light,
Congealing back to flesh that felt too heavy
For any human frame to ever bear.

She felt no pain although the singing fire
That rose up from her chanting voice created
An agony that seemed as if its roots
Were in the universe her mother’s life
Was clutched in, struggling against the formless,
Cold winds that were no winds, miasma blank
Enough to be an element beyond
The understanding of an individual life.
She felt her spell and light that flowed in rainbows
Out from her spell solidify to bone,
Then dragon scales as bright as drops of sun.

She did not think, I am a little girl!,
But felt her transformation as her head
Ballooned into a dragon’s head, her heart
Into the double beating of a dragon’s hearts.
Her hands stopped moving in their spelling dance
As wings grew on her back and arms and legs
Became a dragon’s massive arms and legs.
Inside her mind her mother sang as if
She’d left the nether world and fixed herself
Into the flowing of her daughter’s thoughts.
Wei felt as if she was no longer Wei,
But more than Wei, a human, witch, her mother,
A dragon unlike any other dragon
Hatched from an egg upon warm hatching grounds.

Light hardened into flesh and scales and bones.
Her body seemed too large, unwieldy, awkward,
As if it was not who she was, but still
Was truly who she was, a spirit creature
Transformed out of a human to a dragon
Who had a witch’s powers and a human’s wiles
Imbedded in a child with dragon wings.

At first she only saw the light congealing
A rainbow storm inside her mind, around
Her body; then her hearts began to beat
And then she saw out of a dragon’s eyes,
The whirling strangeness of the world a bending
Of consciousness and even understanding.
She tried to move her massive dragon legs,
But saw her movement made the dragons gathered
Around her in the snow involuntarily
Move back from her, their fear of weirding strong
Enough to make them want to spread their wings
And flee into the freezing winter skies.

Ssruanne and Mmirrimann walked forward, though,
Fear whirling in their eyes, but brave beyond
The ancient age that lived inside their bones.
Wei tried to move again, but felt as if
She was a baby still inside her crib,
Her movements larger than they should have been,
But human-sized, not fitting for a dragon.

Ssruanne, her mind awhirl, sent thoughts
Into the rainbow dragon’s mind, “Slow child,”
She said, awe in the song inside her thoughts.
“You have to take things slow until we know
What magic you have brought into the earth.”

Wei looked at her, at all the dragons strewn
Like boulders on the fields she known since birth.
She tried to find her mother’s ghost among
More dragons than she’d ever dreamed existed
Inside the caves above the cottage she’d
Grown much too large to even fit inside.
She did not want to be a dragon, did
Not want to live a life that was not human.
She could not see her mother, could not feel
The humanness that made her who she was.
She was a girl, she thought. A human girl!

Ssruanne moved close and touched her scales.
Wei tried to move again, but felt the awkwardness
Of never having been so large before.
She stumbled, then moved upright as the strength
Ssruanne sent shocking through her body made
Her feel as if the light about her was her self.
The dragons in the field seemed so intense
With whirling eyes and primal fear she coiled
Away from who she knew she had become.

“Enough!” the thundering voice of Mmirrimann
Demanded calm. “We’re dragons, not the spawn
Of emptiness,” he said. “I’ve heard of this,
Of humans taking on a dragon’s shape
And dragons taking on a human’s shape.
We need to find the reason why this weirdness
Has come just as existence trembles where
Extinction and continuance are poised
Upon a ledge that I can’t see around.”

“Slow, child,” Ssruanne said once again. “You’re not
A dragon, not a human child, but something else.
You’re not alone. Both Mmirrimann and I
Are here; we’ll find the balance that is you,
And then we’ll understand this craziness.”

Wei moved her foot and slowly moved her wings
And let them fall back to her massive back.

“I need my mother who has died,” she said
While looking at Ssruanne’s bright golden eyes.

Ssruanne looked at the dragon child as large
As any full-grown dragon, but was silent.
As Mmirrimann stared at the rainbow fire
That seemed to pulsate from Wei’s dragon scales,
He started humming, dredging up a song
Out of the depths of dragon memory.
Another dragon started humming too, and then
The mass of dragons hummed, an echo bouncing
Out of the caves that were their mountain home.

Wei startled. What was going on? But then her mother,
Inside the flesh that was her flesh, inside the dragon
That she had wanted to become, began
To hum just like the field of dragons hummed

She looked into Ssruanne, her golden eyes.
She was a dragon. Born of light, her mother’s
Deep human love for her had turned her life
Into a dragon’s life. Her mother lived
Inside of her, inside the dragon that she was.

She glanced at Mmirriman, Ssruanne.
She felt her mother’s humming, heard the song
Dredged from the ancient dragon memories.
She moved her massive legs and tested wings
That felt as if they could not be her wings.

And then, deep in her chest, she let the song
She felt come out of her so powerfully
It added music to the dragons’ song.

To listen to this section of the epic, click on The Song of Becoming a Dragon.
Note: This is the thirty-seventh section of a long narrative poem, which has grown into The Dragon Epic. Originally inspired by John Keats’ long narrative poem, Lamia, it tells a story set in ancient times when dragons and humans were at peace. Click on the numbers below to reach other sections, or go to the Categories box to the right under The Dragon Epic. Click on Dragonflies, Dragons and Her Mother’s Death to go to the beginning and read forward. Go to Mesmerized Cave Dragons to read the passage before this one. To read the next passage, click onThe Mind’s Black Fire.

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November 21, 2012 · 6:23 am

A Moment

a love poem by Thomas Davis to Ethel

The aftermath of a moment
Is hard to describe:
The beauty:
A flash of sunlight
Through the storm darkened sky,
The wonder of beauty
Which may never come again.

Love, there was a night
When the stars were slung
Over the sky’s black face.
You were singing a lullaby,
And I was changing words into song.
We were happy and love filled.
The night was a rhythm of ourselves.
You laughed and made me see geese
With white wings in dark skies.
I laughed, and you stopped your lullaby.

Love is a kin to the silence
And also to the song.

You and I were singing,
And both of us stopped
To listen to silence.

It was a wonderful evening, love.
It is a wonderful time.

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November 17, 2012 · 10:00 am

36. Mesmerized Cave Dragons

an epic poem, The Dragon Epic, by Thomas Davis

1

Ssruanne’s cry ripped through Mmirrimann and jerked
Him upright in his cave, his whirling eyes
So bright they made the morning light seem dim.
He moved toward his ledge and launched in flight
Like other dragons from their sheer cliff caves.
The sky was filled with dragons, colorful
And urgent as they flew toward Ssruanne.
As Mmirrimann flew violently toward
The cottage where the witch’s child was braving
The harshness of the winters’ cold and wind,
He saw an image of Sshruunak, black wings
A smudge above the icy mountain peaks,
Imagining his victory against
Ssruanne and Mmirrimann, his mind still not
Aware of all the forces lining up
Against the brightness of his shining dreams.

Then, heart beats wild, the ancient dragon felt
The place where grim shades gloamed inside the dusk.
He felt disintegrating history
As dragons failed into miasma’s cold.
He almost plummeted to earth to see
Ssruanne upon the ground beside a whirling,
Wild dance of colors where the human girl
Was changing from a human’s frail, small shape
Into a dragon’s powerful, full form.
The girl was melding spindly bones and flesh
Into hard scales that shined with rainbow light
That caught the morning sun and danced and whirled
With making so unnatural and weird
It made him want to flee to memories
Where life was how it ought to be and weirding
Was more a legend than reality.
He roared so loud he thought he’d strained his lungs,
But then he heard the other roars surrounding
The place of transformation, heard the fear
That raged into the morning’s clear, clean skies.
He spread his wings and landed as a hundred
Great dragons found a place to place their legs.

What madness had inhabited the world?
The dragons sat inside a massive circle
Around the human girl and felt her melding
As power danced out of her human heart
Into the thunder of a dragon’s hearts.
As time coagulated, formed, then flowed
Into the swirl of being, nothingness
Around the rainbow dragon, human girl,
Ssruanne began to hum deep in her chest,
Her song so deep it throbbed out of her bones.
Her song memed out into the other dragons,
Their voices oscillating through the snow,
The earth caught in the miracle arising
From where the nexus of the ether-world
Had linked into a weirding of reality.
The thrumming dragon song reverberated
Off mountain peaks and echoed through the caves
That sang the song into the valleys far
From where Ssruanne and Mmirrimann sat stunned
Upon the plateau climbing to the mountains.
What madness had inhabited the world?

Huge dragons, rainbow colored, like small hills,
Upon the whiteness of a winter’s snows,
Around a rainbow swirl of burning light
Shaped like a dragon never seen before
In all of space or time, hummed dragon songs
That seemed to fill the universe in time
And where the chaos of the swirling souls
Spun emptily past dragon memories.

2

What have I done? Ruarther thought. I am…

The golden dragon that had made him run
Away from her so long ago came down
And landed in the snow beside the child
Transforming from her small girl human shape
Into a swirl of light now dragon shaped,
And then another dragon landed, then
Another, then another, wings so loud
It made him deaf to any other sound.

The dragons closed around him, breaths so loud
It made him feel as if he’d chanced a storm
Too powerful to live through if he stayed
In place without a shelter from the winds,
But not one dragon even looked at him.
They landed, whirling eyes fixed on the light
That burned a rainbow dragon’s hearts alive
Into a life that could not really be.

Ruarther dropped his bow into the snow
And turned toward the forest evergreens
Around the cottage’s stone-earthen walls.
He moved around the dragons one by one.
They did not threaten him or even see
That he was like an ant inside their midst.

He felt the emptiness inside of him,
The absence of the spirit bear who’d lived
Inside his body longer than he’d dreamed.
He thought about Ruanne, her dark disgust
At how a man she loved could dream of killing
A child he’d never known or even met.
How could he have become that evil man?
What madness had inhabited his world?

The dragons did not frighten him or make
Him feel the way he’d felt the night the great
Black dragon had attacked him by the ledge.
He felt confused, afraid of whom he’d been.

He stopped. He could not go back to the village.
He’d never wanted anything so bad.
He wanted to forget the witch’s child
Burned like a brand inside his tortured spirit
And go back to the days when he had been
A hunter bringing game to feed the people
Depending on the skills he’d honed from childhood.

What had he done to him? he asked himself.

Inside the trees he still maneuvered slowly
Around the dragons mesmerized in snow.

To listen to this section of the epic, click on Mesmerized Cave Dragons.

Note: This is the thirty-sixth section of a long narrative poem, which has grown into The Dragon Epic. Originally inspired by John Keats’ long narrative poem, Lamia, it tells a story set in ancient times when dragons and humans were at peace. Click on the numbers below to reach other sections, or go to the Categories box to the right under The Dragon Epic. Click on Dragonflies, Dragons and Her Mother’s Death to go to the beginning and read forward. Go to Determination, Doubt, and Dreams of Victory to go to the section previous to this one. To read the next passage, click on The Song of Becoming a Dragon.

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November 10, 2012 · 7:13 am

A Snow White Song

a children’s poem by Thomas Davis

Softly whisper to the snow
As the snow whispers down from the sky
And cover yourself with a blanket of song
As the snow comes down to lie

Upon the ground, to cover the ground
With a blanket white and cold.
Softly sing your snow white snow
And sleep with the sleep of the snow.

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November 6, 2012 · 6:59 am

35. Determination, Doubt, and Dreams of Victory

Inside the cave he’d clawed in mountain rock
Sshruunak’s resentment at the inconvenience
Of living rough outside the dragon lairs
Far from community he’d always known
Kept waking him, the cold intense enough
To make him wish he’d spent more digging time.
He kept on saying that discomfort made
Him miserable right now, but soon the moon
Would be invisible and then the song
Of dragon wings would beat so dreadfully
The earth would tremble from the flames of rage.

The thought of nineteen males, six fierce females
Now following his lead to dragon war
Seemed like a gift more precious than his hearts
Inside the small cave’s dark, a bolstering
That made his plans more promising than he
Had dreamed that they could ever be before
Their force had left the caves to find Sshruunak.
Inside his head he saw his clutch of dragons
Spread out across the skies, their bodies large
Enough to make irrelevant the men
That scurried with their deadly arrows through
The lanes between their small stone cottages.
He felt the power of their thundering
Inside his hearts and felt so potent-wild
He thought that he could burst out from his cave
And wrest the ancient stories from ancestors
And make them live in glory in this time.

But then the image faded as he thought
About the news his new force brought: Of Mmirrimann
And all the elders on the conclave’s stone,
Especially Ssruanne who’d let her mate
Assume her place upon the dais to call
For dragon war, huge dragons battling dragons
So that the dragon race would grow and thrive.
The old ones’ foolishness enraged him, made
Him want to spew his fire into their smug,
Old surety with force enough to make them cringe,
But still, his followers were young and strong,
But could they face the dragons from the caves?
Could victory be carved from dragons first
And then from humans with their puny strength?
What had he done? Created dominance
That would ensure that dragons lived without
The endless threat that humans represented?
Or made a war where dragon claws and flame
Raked only dragon hides and forced a slide
Into extinction Mmirrimann was fond
Of warning all the dragon caves about?

He’d trained the young males that had followed him
In discipline and strategy, but now
His newer followers were here to join
The battle that he’d planned for carefully,
And though he’d lead his forces through the skies,
What would they do when dragons they had known
The moment when they’d left their eggs for light
Confronted them and came at them with flames?

He’d somehow thought the elders would sit back
And let him fight the humans in his war
And cower in the caves, afraid to stop
Him as he moved to rid the world of humans,
But if the dragons that had left the conclave
To join him in the mountains had it right,
His war against the humans was a part
Of what they faced, the other part a war
He had not planned or even contemplated.

The doubts gnawed at his stomach, made him want
To bawl his fear and helpless feelings out
Into the quiet night and make them vanish,

But if he showed his feelings to the others,
He’d heard the hesitancy in the way
The new ones told of elders at the conclave
And felt the cold dismay the males had felt
To feel the possibility of war
Fought with their fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers…

What could he do? he asked himself. What should
He do before he could not stop events from moving
So fast he had no choice but forward movement
Toward a destiny that was not guaranteed
To be the destiny his dreams had formed?

He thrashed inside the cave and cold and moved
His wings–and then had left the cramped, close cave
For air that whistled as he flapped his wings.
Stars shined so bright they rained their silver light
Upon the valley far below his flight.
Great dragon bodies moved uncomfortably
To hear him leave his clawed out earth and soar
Into the crystal darkness of the night.
For hours the newest dragons had clawed earth
To make themselves a cave where they could sleep,
But mountain rock was hard, and days were needed
To make a cave, not hours before night came.

Still, no one followed him into the sky.
One day to train the new ones how to fight
A war with strategy instead of rage,
He thought. Stoormachen and the others who
Had learned the tactics had to take the lead.
The clutch he led would not be quite as fierce
As what he’d dreamed when he had set his rage
Toward the moment when he’d wage a war
Against the hunter who had sent his arrow
To blind his eye and wrap him deep with pain,
But cowering was not the dragon way—
Not even if Ssruuanne and Mirrimmann
Were strong enough to fill the skies with dragons
Opposing him and what his mind had willed.

He drove his wings down, spurted higher, up
Into the thinner air toward the stars.
They’d win, he screamed inside himself. They’d win!
They had no other choice than victory.

To listen to this section of the epic, click on Determination, Doubt, and Dreams of Victory

Note: This is the thirty-fifth section of a long narrative poem, which has grown into The Dragon Epic. Originally inspired by John Keats’ long narrative poem, Lamia, it tells a story set in ancient times when dragons and humans were at peace. Click on the numbers below to reach other sections, or go to the Categories box to the right under The Dragon Epic. Click on Dragonflies, Dragons and Her Mother’s Death to go to the beginning and read forward. Go to Metamorphosis to go to the section previous to this one. To read the next section of the epic, click on Mesmerized Cave Dragons.

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