a pastel by Ethel Mortenson Davis
Mourning Dove
Filed under Art, Art by Ethel Mortenson Davis, Ethel Mortenson Davis
A Force Inside the Dream of God
by Thomas Davis
Their stomachs ached, they felt ice cold, their eyes
Sank back into their sockets. Still, worn out,
They kept on moving, moving. When the skies
Were dark enough, they got up, brushed the flies,
Mosquitos off, shoved fear and gnawing doubt
Into their bellies’ emptiness, and ran, their route
Through hills and fields, past roads, an exercise
In dreams that live on while the body dies.
But as they moved, the Preacher was a force
Inside the dream of God, a man possessed.
He would not fade. His tongue, without remorse,
Whipped legs too tired to move to movement, stressed
Them all until a blessed miracle
Made life and dreams again seem possible.
Note: I have been posting two of these sonnets at a time. Since I am in the rewriting mode of the novel at the moment, going backward unfortunately, I am afraid I’ll run out of postings for the series before I get to a place where I can keep up the sequence. This is the fifth sonnet I’ve posted from the series. I am working on a novel with a sonnet at the beginning of each chapter. The sonnets themselves are a mixture of forms. This particular sonnet is a Spenserian sonnet.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis
How Hard
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
We talked about children,
their schooling,
their boyfriends.
How they are becoming
serious about their relationships.
We talked about children
becoming people.
How hard it is.
We talked about
how hard creating
a new piece of art is.
How much energy
the making of art takes —
an extraordinary piece of art.
How hard that is:
Like the yellow orchid
in the forest this morning
among the blue waters.
How hard the earth struggled
to bring about that flower:
Like my ancestors
that were sailors,
sailing to other lands —
among the blue waters —
how hard.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry
Publication in The Lyric
I just posted two sonnets and then the latest issue of The Lyric arrived in the mail. The Lyric is the oldest magazine dedicated to traditional verse forms in the North America. Its website can be found at https://thelyricmagazine.com. My Shakespearean sonnet, “A Lover’s Song,” which was written to Ethel several years ago, is in the new issue. I subscribe to the magazine and have had another sonnet published in it about a year ago.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis, Uncategorized
The Miracle Inside a Storm from Hell Inside the Turning Wheels of Time
Sonnets by Thomas Davis
The Miracle Inside a Storm from Hell
Their misery growing as they splashed through streams
And felt huge clouds above the battered trees
That flung down branches as the sorceries
Of wind and hunger screamed and screamed, and screams
Into their fears, their hatred, useless dreams
The Preacher cultivated with an ease
That wasn’t true, not when the miseries
Of hell danced in the storm’s wild, fierce extremes.
And then, as if inside a miracle,
They reached a lonely church, the raging storm
So fierce they quailed inside its crucible,
And knew the light of God, their spirits warm,
The dreams the Preacher preached so lyrical
It made them feel, inside their hell, reborn.
Inside the Turning Wheels of Time
Inside the rhythm of the wagon’s wheels,
The Preacher, with his people crammed beside
Him underneath a false floorboard, untied
His consciousness from who he was, ordeals
He’d face for years now in the past, and reels
Of rainbow light exploded, amplified
A vision where he felt Ezekiel’s tide
Of prophecies burn like a fire that heals.
He saw his Promised Land, boats filled with fish,
A land of gardens lush as men could wish,
And in the garden of his vision, black
As midnight skies, a shining Adam spoke
A chant so sibilant with grace the almanac
Of hours turned like the wagon wheel’s spokes.
Note: These two sonnets continue the series that constitute the beginnings of chapters in a book on a black community that existed on Washington Island before the coming of the Civil War. These sonnets are part of the sequence that deals with the escape of people from the community from the plantations where they were enslaved. The sonnets are written using a mixture of sonnet forms. “The Miracle Inside a Storm from Hell” is a Spenserian sonnet. “Inside the Turning Wheels of Time” is a French sonnet.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis, Uncategorized
“I Let My Students Read Outside Today”
a photograph by Sonja Bingen
U.S. educational policy today emphasizes “informational text” and performing well on standardized tests based upon a “common core” of knowledge. The academics, businesspeople, and politicians who insist upon such nonsense have clearly forgotten what learning is all about. My two daughters, Sonja Bingen and Mary Wood, both teachers, remember how their love of learning was originally sparked, so they are actually teachers who work to instill a love of learning in their students. If the educational theorists would take a vacation from their heavy thoughts and the hieroglyphics of statistics generated from assessment data and spend some time in Sonja’s classroom reading with her students beneath a blooming fruit tree in early spring, perhaps they would remember that it is not knowledge, but an entertaining book or an excited teacher capable of waking a young mind that leads to learning. Maybe then they would stop all the unnecessary testing and pontificating and begin to give teachers the support and freedom they need to generate the drive to learn that enriches those lucky enough to have lost themselves in a book on a gloriously sunny day spent outside in the school’s yard.
Filed under Essays, Photography, Thomas Davis
Door
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
There,
in the bright morning,
hepatica,
whose leaves stay alive
under the dead layer
all winter,
send up flowers
before all others.
It is here where
the pale pink and lavender
are the door opening
to where my god lives:
Her angels are the birds
opening their wings.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry
Publications
Ethel and I continue to have success at getting poems published. We both had poems in this year’s Wisconsin Poets Calendar: http://www.wfop.org/poets-calendar-1/2016-poets-calendar. We got our copies when we went to the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets fall convention in Madison, Wisconsin this weekend. Door County Living Magazine released an article Gary Jones, a fine poet in his own right who had a poem in the last release of the Blue Heron Review that also included a poem by Ethel, wrote at https://doorcountypulse.com/spirits-born-light-poet-tom-davis. At the end of the article the magazine published a Miltonian sonnet I wrote called “Cherry Orchard.”
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis, Uncategorized
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