Tag Archives: nature

Shining Waters and Sonnet 44

photograph by Sonja Bingen

This photograph was taken after the memorial for Kevin Michael Davis, organized by Sonja and Mary Wood, our daughters, was held at Newport Beach on the tip of Door County in Wisconsin, one of Kevin’s favorite places when he was a child and young adult. This beautiful place looks out on Lake Michigan and is filled with the sounds of birds and lapping of waves on sand and wet, black stones. Passing ships are often small dots on the distant horizon.

Sonnet 44

by Thomas Davis

To sum an individual life with words
is like endeavoring to touch a hand
through shadows on a wall. Like falling sand
words flow around our substance; sounds unheard
dance symphonies of brilliant mockingbirds
into an absence; moments fade into a fairyland.

Our son was loved; he loved; he made a mark
in web design, fought deep depression, wrote
some poems and essays, loved to walk the dark,
taught everyone around him, wore a coat
of many-colors from the spirit of his heart,
and blessed his father, mother as he taught

us courage as he faced life torn apart.
His death left us bereft, alone, distraught.

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Gangs

by Ethel Mortenson Davis

The local people say,
don’t walk out in the wilderness
unless you carry a gun,
because of large predators
and wild dogs—

dogs turned loose
in the desert, abused and neglected.
Now in the hundreds of thousands,
they pack up
to find food and survive.
They kill elk and cattle,
and people—
a man in his fifties.

Children abused
And neglected
join gangs in order to survive.
In order to live—
they kill people.

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Weather Upside Down, a photo essay

Snow came to Continental Divide yesterday and last night. Sometimes it was so thick you could not see the Zuni Mountains out the back window.

Ethel Mortenson Davis’s photograph of flowers blooming as snow fell

Up north in Wisconsin, where Sonja Bingen lives, spring is bursting with intensity.

Sonja Bingen’s photographs

Is the north becoming the south?

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Two Watchers

a photograph by Sonja Bingen

Between Gallup, New Mexico and Continental Divide is a place known as Red Rocks Park. Here red sandstone rises into blue skies spring, summer, winter, and fall, looking out at the land with the almost-not-moving patience of cliffs and earth.

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The Dance

a photograph and poem by Ethel Mortenson Davis

There is a dance
the bee makes
when it has found food.
It dances in the hive
with all the other bees
looking on
until each one
understands the dance
and knows where to fly–

unlike the astronauts
who came around
from the dark side
of the moon
and saw (for the first time)
what the earth looked like,
new and bright
and more beautiful
than we could have imagined–
a blue-green jewel
shrouded in white clouds.

They wanted to tell us
the best thing
about going into space
was the earth itself.

They wanted to do
the dance for us,
but we could not
get the sense of it.
We could not imitate
the dance.

The Dance copyright © I Sleep Between the Moons of New Mexico, 2010.

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Cat in the Pere Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, France

a photograph by Alazanto, Kevin Davis, our son

Taken on November 15, 2009

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Empty Nest in a Bush with Thorns

a photograph by Sonja Bingen

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Kite Flying

a photo essay by Sonja Bingen

The winds of early spring sing windy songs
and young boy’s thoughts begin to long

for wings that lift his feet off ground to sky
and let his spirit start to fly.

He starts upon a hill, runs, lets legs stretch
as gentle winds begin to catch

the kite into its dance of buffeting
as paper, string, and tail go soaring

into a place where boys have always run
into the joy of springtime’s sun.

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Sonnet 42

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.

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April Spring

Photographs of Spring by Sonja Bingen, our daughter

 

April
a poem by Ethel Mortenson Davis

April on tossed hair,
in trees,
across the paths and grass
with branches stuck in seas of sky,
comes,

and
nowhere
is the snow
that covered us
and protected us,
but now
green
pushes up,
and
i
hold on
a moment like bark
and hear

a swinging down
out of trees

and
i see
your surprised
face
when
the earth jumps up fast to meet your legs.

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