photographs by Ethel Mortenson Davis
Tag Archives: ice
Still Winter, Cave Point
Photographs by Ethel Mortenson Davis
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Photography
Sturgeon Bay Shipyards in Winter
a photograph by Ethel Mortenson Davis
Every winter Great Lakes ships come to the Sturgeon Bay Shipyards for refurbishing after a long season on the water. This year 16 ships, small to large, have come into the harbor and been parked at the Shipyards in the Bay’s ice.
Filed under Art, Ethel Mortenson Davis, Photography
The Lake
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
In the cold winters
around the Great Lakes,
ice moves
in constant, fluid motion
making cracking sounds,
thundering sounds
as ice heaves against ice,
shelf against shelf,
sending echoes out,
across a cold, stiff night,
that sound like a war
being waged,
like someone shooting off cannons
in some distant place.
She is telling us
she is still here;
she is still alive!
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Poetry
Goose Thunder
by Thomas Davis
An Italian, or Petrarchian, Sonnet
All week green waves had groaned and cracked great chunks
Of gleaming ice onto the bay’s curved shore.
Then waves of geese, wings arched, began to pour
Onto the shining lake—small, gabbling monks
Dark-cowled in heaven’s shining, winding trunks
Of bodies stirred by Spring’s esprit de corps
As gabble after gabble, more and more,
Became a mass as open waters shrunk.
A V of snow geese, white with sun-drunk wings,
Swooped down upon the lake. The darkness stirred,
A whirling vortex wild, as honking cries
Become a water spout so large it flings
The lake into a shadow, waters blurred
By roiling, whirring-dark, goose-rising skies.
Note: Nick Moore and I have been attempting different sonnet types the last few postings. I dedicated the first sestina I wrote to both Nick and John Stevens, two poets who gave me the courage to try to write one. I then followed that up with the insanity of a double sestina, “The Time of the Poetic Spirit’s Splitting,” a poem I am still pleased that I wrote. Nick then wrote his own double sestina about cycling, one of his passions, that is better than Algernon Charles Swinburne’s “The Complaint of Lisa,” the first double sestina ever written by one of the great poets in history. All of this, along with a lot of other really good poetry, can be found on his gonecyclingagain.com blog. There are a few wordpress poets who have influenced me over the years. Nick Moore is certainly one of the most important of those poets. He has published his Italian sonnet in response to our current sonnet-writing effort on his blog, along with his Spenserian sonnet. He, like I, have long written Shakespearean sonnets. Ina Schroders-Zeeders at inaweblogisback.wordpress.com has joined us in our sonnet writing challenge.
Filed under Poetry, Thomas Davis
The Yellow Eyes
by Thomas Davis
1
The whiteness wailed with wind-swept waves of snow.
Upon the ice, a dozen miles from land,
The huge man walked into the vertigo
Of emptiness and bitter cold that spanned
Horizons darkening into a night
Intense with clouds that suffocated light.
He heard the wolf before he saw its eyes
Gleamed yellow in accumulating dark.
Its panting separated from the cries
Inside the wind so subtly that the spark
Of fear that nearly made his legs give way
Seemed like the rhythm of the dying day.
The great wolf, coat as black as anthracite,
Loomed like a shadow from a stinging wave
Of snow, a darkness darker than the night,
A vision dredged from dreams born in a grave.
A heavy tiredness weighed inside the man.
The wolf kept eyes upon the path he ran.
As hours passed hours the universe became
A movement shared between the man and wolf.
The storm died down. At dawn a yellow flame
Along the far horizon’s edge unveiled a roof
Of clouds that felt as if they were a vice
Pressed down upon the endless miles of ice.
The man kept staring at the white expanse
Stretched endlessly away from where they were.
He felt his spirit caught inside a trance
Transforming time into a senseless blur
Of wolf breath, gusts of wind, and running feet
Staccatoed pulsing through his heart’s strained beat.
As evening gathered up the winter skies,
The great wolf growled and shocked the man aware.
The yellow eyes looked deep into his eyes.
The storm swirled deep inside the untamed stare.
He stopped. The wolf stopped, growled so low
The storm stirred winds and stinging waves of snow—
And then the wolf was gone into the trees
That forested the hills above the rocky shore.
Alone, but near to land, still not at ease,
He walked toward the cedars bent before
Him like a haven from the plains of white
As suddenly the ice was bathed in light.
2
Years later, sitting by a council fire
As dancers danced the heartbeat of the drum,
A wailing howl rose from the forest, dire
As if the ending of the world had come.
The big man stood, the council’s patriarch,
And walked, without a word, into the dark.
Filed under Poetry, Thomas Davis
The Well
a children’s poem by Thomas Davis
“The well has gone dry for the winter!
Oh my! Oh my! What shall we do?
The well has gone dry for the winter!
Oh my! Oh my! What shall we do?”
“Go down to the creek with a bucket
And clear the crusted ice away.
Dip the bucket into the water
And carry the water away.”
Filed under Poetry, Thomas Davis
River in Winter
A photograph by Sonja Bingen
“It’s so cold I was frostbitten taking these photos.”
Filed under Art, Photography
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