Four Windows Press has just released Ethel Mortenson Davis’s eighth book of poetry along with a magnificent cover designed by the poet. The book is available at amazon.com and other online retailers as well as through bookstores. It is carried by Novel Bay and Otherworlds bookstores in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin.
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by Ethel Mortenson Davis
She had to take her nursing infant
with her to her final exam
because the babysitter hadn’t shown up.
The professor threw her out,
but she completed her degree
and has been teaching for thirty years.
Now she is facing another exam,
one called cancer.
We, as mothers, daughters, and grandmothers,
are connected through our wombs.
We will stand with her, all of us together.
No one will throw her out.
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This above article is about my newest book, Meditation on Ceremonies of Beginnings. John Looker wrote a great review of the book too:
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Christine Reidhead has just informed me that The Los Angeles Tribune has put a second podcast I did with Christine on leadership on its website’s front page. We did ten of these in total, and the Tribune has told Christine that they have reviewed all ten and will be running all ten of them. How Christine talks me into these things sort of mystifies me, and then how she manages to get major national coverage for them amazes me even more. Her work at Navajo Technical University in the Navajo Nation as the head of the business department is amazing. Her list of scholarly publications in business journals keeps growing. Her founding of Afrika Rising!, a non-profit that works in Africa, has earned her multiple significant honors. She is much more extraordinary than I am. I have no idea how many magazines have had her on their front cover. I just know that it has been a lot of them. The Tribune also ran a long article about the second podcast in the ten podcast series to accompany the podcast’s availability. Here’s the link:
https://thelosangelestribune.com/2020/11/10/tom-davis-reveals-qualities-of-leadership-in-the-latest-podcast-with-christine-reidhead/?fbclid=IwAR1H9d1M8hatVEdg3XfJknSloDRnLouuZSuLou-thP0PBa3x8DxH0jHvbDU
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Ethel and I have put up a new website for the small publishing effort, Four Windows Press, we keep developing. Our granddaughter, Phoebe Wood, has come up with a logo for the website, which is located at http://www.fourwindowspress1.com. Ethel likes the logo as a work of art!
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after 11 inches of new snow
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
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by Ethel Mortenson Davis
for April Chischilly
Little bird,
with wound on her chest,
comes to my water
each day.
Other birds
push her back,
but she is steadfast and stays.
She reminds me of you.
The first sunlight
that warms my body
in the early spring
after a long, cold winter
reminds me of you.
This morning, as the red, glowing mushroom
shone out from the dark forest floor,
an orange- red like no other,
it, too,
reminds me of you.
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by Thomas Davis
for April Chischilly
Beneath red cliffs as first morning light reflects fire
into an impossibly blue sky,
a Navajo woman, aging, calm, long black hair and black eyes
a part of high desert juniper and pinion trees,
walks as beauty stirs backwards and forward in time.
The medicine man in his Hogan’s darkness
sees a woman he doesn’t know through an ancient crystal
handed from medicine man to medicine man
through thousands and thousands of years.
He feels heart-strength, spirit-strength,
sees her facing what is beyond the light’s weaving,
her beauty-song echoing and echoing
into the song of women, the spirit of women
who have forever given birth
and lived through the everyday turmoil of everyday
without flinching, trying to find the courage that is who she is.
Courage weaves a blanket from light out of the woman’s heart
into the texture of red stone.
It rises from the moment when sons were born,
patience was worn away as dreams and hopes were deferred,
as self honesty penetrated weaving consciousness
that tries to protect itself in the interest of shuttling
strength and goodness into the sinews and spirits of children.
Speaking softly, singing beauty, the Navajo woman walks
beneath cliff fire ignited by first light
beneath an impossibly blue sky.
The Navajo woman walks beneath red cliffs
in an impossible blue sky
as first light sets sandstone walls on fire.
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