Photograph by Kevin Michael Davis (Alazanto)
Thinking of Kevin today
Tag Archives: New Mexico
Apples for the Wild Stallion is Published!
I just received some unexpected news! All Things That Matter Press has just published my newest novel, Apples for the Wild Stallion. Written for my grandson, Joey Bingen, after his mother Sonja looked up at me one day while starting to read the first Harry Potter book to him and told me that she had been looking for books that he could relate to but couldn’t find any, the novel features a hero that cannot talk because of his autism, but is a hero anyway. He, along with his family living on Wrangler Road just outside Continental Divide, NM where Ethel used to take her daily walks into wilderness, face up to a gang of thugs that threaten them and their neighbors and a magical wild stallion that keeps coming for apples that Austin, the hero, keeps placing between a grandmother juniper tree in the Zuni Mountains where their ranch is located.
Sonja Bingen, our daughter, contributed the photograph that is on the cover and wrote a small piece about Joey in the book. His grandfather is hoping that when Joey listens to the novel it not only gives a character that he can relate to but also gives him an experience he never forgets. I expected the book to come out in June, but now it can be ordered from bookstores, from amazon.com, and other places where young adult books are sold!
Filed under Published Books, Thomas Davis
Cover Release for Apples for the Wild Stallion
All Things That Matter Press have released the cover for my new novel, Apples for the Wild Stallion. This book was written after my daughter, Sonja Bingen, one day remarked to me, while she was starting to read the first Harry Potter book to Joey, our non-verbal autistic grandson, I have really searched for a book that had a character Joey can relate to in his life, but have had trouble finding any. This cover was done by my ATTMP editor, Deb Harris, who based it on a photograph Sonja did on Joey and a brown mare who resembles Brownie, one of the horses, the one Joey rides, in the novel. The novel is set in the Zuni Mountains of New Mexico on Wrangler Road where Ethel, when lived in Continental Divide, did her daily walk with our dogs. The wild, white stallion of the novel’s title changes Joey’s life, but he returns the favor to the stallion in the story.
Filed under Photography, Published Books, Thomas Davis
All Things That Matter Press Offers a New Contract
Ethel and I were at my daughter Sonja’s house. She, Ethel, and Joey, our non-verbal autistic grandson, were sitting in the living room talking about the difficulty Sonja was having dealing with Joey’s new high school. Then, looking wistful, Sonja said something to the effect that she had been looking for books that Joey could relate to where the hero was like him. She’d only been able to find one book that sort of was like that, she told Ethel and I. Looking at him, with him paying attention to what she was saying, she said that you’re smart enough to learn, aren’t you Joey.
Afterward I got to thinking about what Sonja was saying. A little after that I sat down to start a novel about a non-verbal autistic boy who is a hero. The writing did not go well at first. The first chapter, reviewed for me by Sonja and Emma MacKenzie, a writer friend, was pretty bad. But, as usual, I kept at it. Ethel kept encouraging me. The result was a novel, Apples for the Wild Stallion. Ethel gave me the title name.
Yesterday All Things That Matter Press sent me a publishing contract for Apples for the Wild Stallion. It always takes awhile between signing the contract and actual publication, but I’ll be especially happy to see this particular novel in print.
The truth is that human beings all have different abilities and gifts. Humans are so good at discrimination, as the events in Minneapolis right now so painfully illustrate, but the truth is that Joey is a marvelous human being. When he smiles Ethel and I feel like the sun is coming out after days of rain. He is worth paying attention to and loving. He is a hero, like so many of the people who face terrible discrimination in their lives. He deserves praise, not the looks he and his family get when they go to a restaurant, and his arm goes up or his head shakes in a way that makes some of those eating in that place uncomfortable.
So, this novel is for Joey, and, in a sense, for all of those like Joey who have lives that are important in spite of the small ideas in other people’s heads.
Filed under Published Books, Thomas Davis
Light
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
Stepping
from flat Texas
with wind-driven snow
into New Mexico
surprised us.
Suddenly
the earth changed plans
and rocked us
with red-browns and pinion greens,
flooding the cornea
of our eyes
with brightness.
Kneeling before us
you appeared.
We ran to embrace
your holy prostration.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry
Goldleaf
poem and photograph by Ethel Mortenson Davis
Stopped
to look
at the Byzantine light
coming out of the morning sky ̶
goldleaf
burnishing the edges,
turning the deep mountains
violet.
Take my hand
before we become
common!
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Photography, poems, Poetry
From Ancient Way in New Mexico
photo by Ethel Mortenson Davis from where we stayed during our New Mexico trip.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Photography
The Seer
A ballad by Thomas Davis
“It is hard to follow one great vision in this world of darkness and of many changing shadows. Among those men get lost.”
― Black Elk, Black Elk Speaks
“Not far from Big Skylight and Four Windows Caves,
across fields of aa lava, loose, rough, sharp, flecked with green and orange lichen,
in darkness so absolute light becomes a memory,
blind dragons live beside an underground river”
— Thomas Davis, Inside the Blowholes
One day and night, three days and nights,
He sat inside the earth
And stared at winter’s cold, bright skies
Awaiting spring’s rebirth.
Inside his heart an awful dread
Quaked through each day’s long hours,
His mind’s shade stirring strange,
Malevolent, dark powers.
At sixteen years he should have been
Alive to all life held,
But in the windswept wilderness
He sat alone, compelled
To wait for promises that hung
Suspended in the air —
As foreign to his wish for life
As ghosts of grizzly bears.
Then, with the rising of the moon,
As puffs of glittering snow
Flowed ghostly over coal-black stones,
A trance began to flow
Like water over who he was,
His dreaming powerful
Enough to give him second sight,
A world turned beautiful.
And from the east he saw them flying,
Great beasts with whirling eyes,
Bright wings, long necks outstretched, their bodies
Dark in cold, night skies.
Inside his cave his vision thundered songs
As beasts as large as hills
Flew straight toward his hiding place,
Then flared their wings, a shrill
Bewailing shivering alive
The silver moon, the stones,
The night-time universe,
His fragile frame of human bones.
“Beware! Beware!” His spirit wailed.
“We’re dragons,” said huge minds
Inside his mind. “We’re all that’s left
Of ancient dragonkind.”
He tried to cringe back in his cave,
But as the dragons sank
Their claws in earth and slowly walked
Past where he hid and shrank
From heads and bodies nightmare-huge,
He felt how sadness filled
The night and twisted who he was,
His boyhood murdered, killed
By creatures that could not be real,
By sadness from a trance,
By loss much greater than the loss
Of humans from life’s dance.
The dragons passed him in the night,
Came to a cave so huge
It seemed to swallow dragons whole
Into a centrifuge.
As dragon after dragon went
Beneath volcanic ground,
He held his breath and prayed and prayed
He’d not be seen nor found.
At last a single dragon paused
Before the mawing dark;
She seemed to sigh before she left
The night, a matriarch
Who did not want to leave the world
For life inside old fires
Long ossified to rock and sure
To end her life’s desires.
And as she paused she turned and saw
Him huddled in his cave.
Her eyes whirled fire and made him quake
While trying to be brave.
She made no sound, but stared at him
Until, his heartbeats wild,
He crawled into the night
And stood, a frightened human child
Inside the gaze of dragon eyes
That bored into his heart
And stripped him of humanity,
His spirit rived apart.
The dragon snorted, sending fire
Into the nighttime air.
He stood and forced his eyes to match
The dragon stare for stare.
The world seemed poised upon a brink
Where revelations stormed,
But then the dragon turned from Seer,
Child, leaving him forlorn.
Inside the moment when the dragon
Turned, left him once again
Alone, his hair turned white; he aged
And grinned an old man’s grin.
He kept the dragons’ secret safe
And lived a hundred years,
A man apart, a man so strange
He had no sense of fear.
Filed under poems, Poetry, The Dragon Epic, Thomas Davis
Poetry’s One Language: Taliesin in New Mexico
by Thomas Davis
Taliesin walked a sparse wood.
Pink and white stones sheered into cliffs.
This was not the wild seacoast where clerics and bards warred,
declaiming words of power,
but a land as dry as Job’s tongue:
“Where shall wisdom be found?”
The bard had stood on a black rock jutting into sea-fury.
He had called mists and forest spirits,
swarming to gestures and words like ghostly raiments,
then walked through a shimmering gate into sweltering skies.
Standing below a tall, red cliff, he sent his spirit
across a dry land and walked,
feeling poetry falter in the great silence.
On a sandstone table he stopped and stared at hairy black spiders.
A thousand scuttled across the red stone in frenzy.
He could not understand spider’s movement’s language.
He could not feel poetry’s spirit ebb and flow
where no coracle boats or sailing ships plied waves.
He studied a turquoise juniper tree’s green flame
and tried to feel how such small trees could walk,
but they seemed rooted in fields of pink and white stone.
Taliesin trudged with his staff through a long day.
Sun blazed; a horned moon, waxing, rose.
The bard’s heart shuddered.
How was he to escape a land where poetry was tenuous?
Where no selkie dived beneath waves into seaweed forests?
He listened: Women’s voices elegant and wild with frenzy –
Men speaking words as strange as the landscape.
A red wolf howled beneath stars and horned moon.
A cold wind blew.
Pinyon, pine, and juniper branches danced and sang.
The bard smiled and raised arms out of his brown robe.
He spoke poetry’s one language to night sky, trees, and wind.
A black rock jutted into a foaming, wind-driven sea.
Note: The is a rewrite of a poem posted a long time ago.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis
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