a photograph by Sonja Bingen
Tag Archives: Door County
Respite
poem by Ethel Mortenson Davis
We walked Michigan’s shore
against gale winds,
blue-green water
churning up white foam
and throwing large rocks
at our feet
until a stand of cedars
offered warmth and stillness
from the wind.
Leaf-litter
lined the forest floor, softness,
respite from our difficult world.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry
The Cedars Heard . . .
wind talking with waves sweeping into dolomite cliffs, and they began to move as if they were not rooted to earth, but dancing with air and sky . . .
a photograph by Sonja Bingen
Filed under Art, Photography
Looking Out at Lake Michigan at Cave Point
a photograph by Will Bingen, our grandson
Filed under Photography, Uncategorized
Lake Michigan Before Night at Cave Point
a photograph by Sonja Bingen
Filed under Photography, Uncategorized
Lake Michigan Ice and Shore
photographs by Ethel Mortenson Davis
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Photography
A Poet’s Becoming, Fionn’s Gift Across Time
by Thomas Davis
Fionn, son of Mairne, a Chief Druid’s daughter, was instructed by the Druid…to cook for him a salmon fished for a deep pool…and forbidden to taste it; but as Fionn was turning the fish over in the pan he burned his thumb, which he put into his mouth and so received the gift of inspiration. For the salmon was a salmon of knowledge, that had fed on nuts fallen from the nine hazels of poetic art. Robert Graves, The White Goddess. 1966 (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), p. 75.
Upon the dark dolomite jutting
Shoreline out into lake waters,
Brooding, the poet pondered, rising
Vapors misting white where otters
Often twisted brown bodies in brightness
During days of lithesome lightness.
Longing to discover poetry’s essence,
Plunging into intensifying agony,
Its agitated angst and strange candescence,
Searching for wisps of hope, honey
Spirited into hazel nuts fallen
Into waters fused with wisdom’s pollen,
Praying, the poet chanted phrases
Empty of meaning, madness exploding
Dystopian dreams into glazes
Filming stratums in mist, imploding
Into a dance of time: Land distinct,
Shrouding tales of peoples long extinct.
Milky mist rose from the waters.
Paddling in a coracle, Fionn,
Singing softly as sleek otters,
Angled after salmon in an eon
Ever-ending, inspiration
Infusing words into desperation.
Dancing in the poet’s pounding
Heartbeat, language’s lilting incantation
Metamorphosed landscapes, people’s living,
Into a singing suffusion of creation:
Fionn spanning time and continents,
Salmon swimming past despair to resonance.
Filed under Poetry, Thomas Davis
Planting the Wings of Monarch Butterflies
by Thomas Davis
In Southern Door an aging man, face fixed,
Pulled up beside a country road and walked
Toward a wooden fence where milkweed mixed
With grass and weeds, fall’s fiery colors stalked
Into a forest’s weave of summer green,
The season’s changing edged into the day.
Beside the fence the man bent down, serene,
Intent on picking milkweed pods, a fey
Gleam in his eyes. He got into his car
And drove until he found an empty field,
Stopped, pulled a pod out of a mason jar,
And freed milk fluff into a wind that wheeled
Time through the winter to a glorious spring
That sprung a summer graced with monarch wings.
Note: After reading an editorial by Peter Devlin in the Door County Advocate.
Filed under Poetry, Thomas Davis
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