by Ethel Mortenson Davis
I’ve been looking
for someone
to take our hand,
but no one does.
Louise Erdrich says
that in grief you must
take your own hand.
So we must
take our own
and step between the paleness
that camps all around:
In the trees,
in the sunlight,
and in the house.
We must take
our own.
from White Ermine Across Her Shoulders, Ethel Mortenson Davis, Copyright © 2011, available at bn.com.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Poetry
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
I’ll tell you
what it’s like.
It’s like a train
coming
and rolling
over you.
You can’t get
out of the way
or
stop the train
because
it’s too late.
All you can do
is take it–
let it run over you,
let the train
finish its job.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Poetry
by Thomas Davis
Grief leaps from cracks and corners, as I walk
or sit beside our window looking out
toward the mountains, like a fierce-eyed hawk
that slashes from the sky and grabs a trout
that flips and struggles as sharp talons snuff
light out of day, the beating from the heart.
Grief seizes life grown wearisome and tough
beyond all hope that might one day jumpstart
time’s stream and let the sunlight filter down
into the shadows, wakening the joys
that often went unnoticed as I walked on ground
made blessed by my wife, girls, precious boy.
The gray miasma leaps from corners, cracks.
I startle as the sun turns dark, then black.
Note: There are two more sonnets in the sequence I have been posting for months now. Most of the sonnets were written while Ethel’s and my son, Kevin Michael Davis, was in the hospital or at home under hospice care. These last sonnets were written shortly after his death a little over a year ago.
Filed under Poetry, Thomas Davis
by Thomas Davis
Back in New Mexico the monsoon rains
had turned the desert green. Massed sunflowers blazed
with purple bee balm in the fields, the stain
of colors so intense there was a praise
of living in the vibrancy exploding
across a landscape barren, dry, the earth
so sterile that the thought of burgeoning
into a garden seemed a cause for mirth.
We walked in beauty like the Navajo
and thought about our son and how his eyes
would never look again into the glow
of fields of flowers, see the flight of butterflies.
The moment that that thought occurred to me,
I stopped. How can this be reality?
Note: This was written just days after our son’s death in Poughkeepsie, New York.
Filed under Poetry, Thomas Davis
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
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