Photograph by Sonja Bingen
Nature’s Implacable Force
by Thomas Davis
In North Dakota’s winter frost drives deep
Into the ground, soils compacted tight
Until, in spring, the ground heaves, water seeps
Into the soils, and land begins to write
The story of another spring, the slow,
Implacable force nature heaves and cracks
Into the manmade things, the bravado
Of buildings, pipelines, streets, steel railroad tracks.
Inside an empty field an apple tree
Has grown into the crumbling of a farm.
It stands where once a lively family
Built walls to keep them safe and free from harm.
This pipeline will not ever fail, they say.
It won’t leak. Not a minute. Not a day.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis
Sketch
a pastel by Ethel Mortenson Davis
Filed under Art, Art by Ethel Mortenson Davis, Ethel Mortenson Davis
Lighthouse in Winter
a photograph by Sonja Bingen, our daughter
Filed under Art, Photography, Uncategorized
An Elder’s Prayer
by Thomas Davis
They frack the earth. Drills fly into the soil
And whirl through rock, a stream of chemicals
Shot down into the shale, the oracles
Of business, profit, subjugation, oil
Enraptured by technology, the coil
Inside the engine driving humankind,
The writ of progress, greed, force sealed and signed.
The oilmen say, we need the fracked-up oil.
An elder walks into the winter cold
And kneels beside a frozen lake and lifts
His arms toward dark clouds, his spirit bold
Enough to recognize creation’s gifts.
“The radiance of water, soil, and sky,”
He sang. “Is in a baby’s first-breath cry.”
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis, Uncategorized
In Memoriam, Kevin Davis, Our Son February 16, 1982 – July 23, 2010
a photograph taken by Kevin in Paris
Filed under Uncategorized
Gray-White Geese
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
Put your arms around me
to keep the desert winds
from blowing through me.
Now!
As the snow clouds have gathered
like gray-white geese
gathering on water.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry
America
a pastel by Ethel Mortenson Davis
Filed under Art, Art by Ethel Mortenson Davis, Ethel Mortenson Davis, Photography
Shiva’s Dancing
by Thomas Davis
Ben Naga published a short poem on his blog, https://bennaga.wordpress.com:
SHIVA’S DANCING
Inhale thyme, the spice of life
Dance the music of rhythm
A tapestry woven through
Time and space in harmony
I responded with free verse:
And inside Orion, where gas the size of planets spit
out of a black hole’s enormous yaw,
and where incubators blaze suns out of what seems light,
but is really reactors coalescing into the splitting of nuclei,
Shiva went walking.
As he walked he felt, rather than saw, the forces of destruction
annihilating into the forces of creation,
and the foment caused by his walking and his thoughts
inside a place generating the growth of a galaxy
let him sit on the side of a mountain in the Himalayas
as a snow leopard and two spotted cubs
leapt from a ledge of old ice
toward a cliff face where mountain goats danced with dark hooves away
into clouds descended from heaven.
Ben Naga responded to that by saying, I like the poem. So full of powerful imagery. Should I challenge you to tame this outpouring into a sonnet?
I responded:
Shiva’s Dancing
Gas from a black hole’s yaw hurled massively
To deep, deep space. In Orion suns blazed
Out from the incubator galaxy,
New stars a coalescing plasma raised
From clouds of light as Shiva walked
In nothingness and felt unraveling
Annihilate into creation as he stalked
Through dances of light’s christening.
Upon a Himalayan mountaintop
He sat. Snow leopards, muscling with grace,
Leapt from a ledge of ice, the yawing drop
Below them sheer, a cliff’s dark, rocky face.
Two mountain goats danced, dark with hooves, away
Into a cloudy heaven’s roiled ballet.
One thing links to another, then causes a reaction that has, somehow, the definition of creativity inside it.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis
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