by Ethel Mortenson Davis
In memory of Donald Sharp and Rumi
Was it the spring stream,
flowing out of the escarpment
tumbling, bubbling over fallen birch trees?
Or was it the large, sloppy snowflakes
falling in the spring morning’s forest,
as trees held their breath,
held their breathing
for the sun to overtake the cold,
that made my wings open and close,
readying me to take flight?
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry
a photograph of our grandson by Sonja Bingen, our daughter
Filed under Art, Photography, Uncategorized
The new issue of The Road Not Taken, a Journal of Formal Poetry has just published one of my sonnets, “Spreading Wings.” You canhttp://journalformalpoetry.com, then click on the Spring 2016 issue and scroll down. Since both of our daughters, Sonja and Mary, were present at the poetry reading at the Reader’s Loft Bookstore in Green Bay (http://www.houseofthetomato.com/march), I read this Italian sonnet there. The sonnet is about them when they were young. I wrote it during an extremely terrifying time in Ethel’s and my life when Kevin, our 27 year old son, was in the process of dying from cancer. Writing sonnets (I wrote 44 in all) was the only way I could bear what Ethel, I, and, of course, Kevin most of all, were going through. What concerned me day after day was our family and remembering incidents that made up the substance of our lives as a family. This sonnet tells of a time that I remember with great love in my spirit.
Raising children is not always easy, but I like to think that at least part of what Ethel and I have achieved in life is the way our two daughters have reflected into our granddaughters and grandsons. They both are beyond outstanding parents, always willing to sacrifice so that their children can meet whatever promise they have in life. I am also convince that they are great teachers because of the spirit they have inculcated from the time they were toddlers, dancing through life with a verve that gives no quarter to a universe that is not always kind.
I hope those of you who go to read the sonnet will enjoy it.
Filed under Poetry, Thomas Davis, Uncategorized
photograph by Ethel Mortenson Davis
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Photography, Uncategorized
by Thomas Davis
Inflamed Imagining: Freedom
Inside the swamp, beside a cypress tree,
White herons in the water, bullfrog croaks
A symphony as dusk, as stealthily
As cat’s feet stalking small, shy birds, evokes
The coming night, the Preacher slowly stokes
The fire blazed in his heart and starts to sing
Songs powerful enough to loosen yokes
White masters forged through endless menacing.
The words he’d use burned deep; he felt their sting
And saw his spirit fire alive in eyes
Awake to dreams, inflamed imagining
Of days spent free beneath glad years of skies.
The darkness deepened underneath the tree.
He’d preach, he thought, then, later on, they’d flee.
Freedom’s First Night, Before Dawn
A Miltonian Sonnet with Two Coda
The white man, with his wide brimmed hat and face
Stunned pale inside a night that breathed with sounds
From woods they’d passed through in their frantic race
Against the coming dawn, turned back around
To look toward the barn that loomed ahead
Of where six families hid in scratchy brush.
He sighed as if he couldn’t flee the dread
He felt in dark before dawn’s first red blush.
“I made a space to hide you runaways,”
He said. He turned again and looked at eyes
That looked at him, cold fear a noxious glaze
Infecting even how the dreaded sun would rise.
“Six families can’t escape at once,” he said.
“I’ve got my family too. They’re still in bed.”
The Preacher looked into the man.
His eyes looked past white outer flesh
Into the place his soul began.
The white man turned again, the mesh
Of eyes surrounding him afraid
To move, to dream, to think they’d leave
This place before their master flayed
Their spirits, made their spirits grieve.
Note: I’ve included two sonnets from my series on Washington Island’s black community that existed in the 1800s here. I’ve posted others in the series earlier, although they were not written originally in a chronological order, so they represent how they are written, not how they should appear. I didn’t know what I was doing at first. However, the owner of the Fair Isle Bookstore on Washington Island convinced me to write a book about the 1800s black community since no books on that topic exist. I thought about it, did some research, found some primary source documents, but they were not enough to produce a non-fiction work. This series of sonnets began to expand. Then I started writing a novel, which is in progress, with a sonnet ahead of each chapter. These are the first two chapter heading sonnets in the novel.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis, Uncategorized
The House of Tomato website, developed by Tori Grant Welhouse, one of Wisconsin’s most important poets, a graduate of Antioch University London, and the Vice President for the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets in northeast Wisconsin, has posted a podcast from the poetry reading Ethel and I did in Green Bay on Thursday at the Reader’s Loft Bookstore. The website address is http://www.houseofthetomato.com/march for those who might be interested.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis, Uncategorized
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
She went to the great black first,
then the bay.
She had carrots
in one of her coat pockets.
“Which pocket?” she asked.
Their soft muzzles always
found the right one,
happy to munch the carrots.
Then one day
the black was gone,
his stall cleaned out,
and shovels put in his place.
“Where’s Dick?” she asked.
“He went to the fox farm because
ladies need fur coats,” he said.
The bay remained for
a number of years,
sleeping in the winter sun
with his head too low to the ground.
Then one day the bay too
was gone,
his great body and his work
folded into the fields
outside his window.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry, Uncategorized
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
Filed under Art, Art by Ethel Mortenson Davis, Ethel Mortenson Davis, Uncategorized
The Preacher sat upon a rocky hill
Above a cave where waters from the lake
Crashed angrily above the soaring shrill
Of gulls excited by a splashing wake
Of fish caught by the afternoon’s harsh light
Flashed back into the early Fall’s blue sky.
He sat upon the hill, his second sight
Unmoored and wild, and listened as the lie
He’d told himself when struggling to find
The island where his people could be free
Wrapped round reality, the awful bind
Of white men, dark men in the company
Of humankind, their kind, the hunger spun
From dreams once dreamed beneath a noonday sun.
Note: The title paraphrases a line from Pablo Neruda. This is the fourth sonnet in the series I am writing about the black community that existed for a short while on Washington Island off the tip of Door County. It was developed during a workshop led by Ralph Murre.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis
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