by Alazanto, Kevin Davis, our son
Note: Thoreau, New Mexico, October 30, 2006.
Enchantment
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
I sleep
between the moons of New Mexico—
sunset and sunrise.
My bed is the yellow-ocher grasses
dotted with green juniper and piñon.
I am the summer sun climbing
from the life-giving phase
into the deadly phase–
like the rattlesnake,
deadly and life-giving,
that blends into the yellow grasses
as it careens along
the canyon’s face.
I cover myself
with the blue mountains,
with moon-like stars.
I am the spirit of wonderment.
I am a spell
upon every living being
in my path.
Copyright © 2010, I Sleep Between the Moons of New Mexico
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Poetry
Sonnet 32
by Thomas Davis
They came to see him as his body failed,
the morphine shredding boundaries between
the world we know and dream worlds where the seam
of time and substance is at last unveiled
and all the phantoms that have ever sailed
into our consciousness become a stream
of concrete beings shed of cloaking dreams,
the boundaries that held them prisoners curtailed.
He asked us if we saw them in the room.
We didn’t look, but looked at him instead,
resisting how we felt inside the gloom
that haunted us inside our haunted heads.
When, at long last, he spent his days asleep,
his spirit was the one we wished to keep.
Filed under Poetry, Thomas Davis
The Road
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
Because this night
is so cold and beautiful
with a thin-lipped moon
just above the horizon,
we will walk the road.
The road over there–
that is waiting,
the one that climbs
up into the Zuni Mountains.
A man once said
that my poems
were only scratches on paper.
The light is getting late,
and the dogs are anxious.
The poems are waiting out there
in the wildness
to say and be,
themselves.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Poetry
Dancer with Headdress
A pastel by Ethel Mortenson Davis
Filed under Art, Art by Ethel Mortenson Davis, Ethel Mortenson Davis
Sonnet 30
by Thomas Davis
I think about the moment when I heard
about each grandchild’s birth and how I felt.
The world, each time, took flight as if it dealt
in glory: Like the nests of bowerbirds,
red, blazing sunsets, Chaucer’s ancient words,
the stillness of a lake of glacier’s melt,
or bardic songs sung by the ancient Celts
that conjured life as Gaia bloomed and stirred.
Each face, in turn, became an individual self
that slowly grew toward what they could be:
Not pottery or flowers put upon a shelf,
but living human beings not contained, but free.
Inside this grief I cannot find myself,
but hear grandchildren laughing, wild with glee.
Filed under Poetry, Thomas Davis
Winged Victory of Samothrace
by Alazanto, Kevin Davis, our son
Taken in Paris, November 15, 2009
Filed under Art, Photography
Zuni
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
There is a place
on the high desert
where the sky
kneels down
and talks (with the people),
and where the blue mountains
pull them up to its heart—
where each one
has a place,
and no one
is left behind,
a place of little water,
where each cup
is drunk with gratitude—
and where children
on the school bus
stand and applaud
when the ditches
are running with water,
or when the mountain is white
in the morning
from last night’s
surprise spring snow.
Note: The Zuni people are a Pueblo Nation living in western New Mexico. This poem came from a story told by John Carter North at the Inscription Rock Trading Post poetry group meetings on Sunday morning.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Poetry
