by Ethel Mortenson Davis
We saw
jays
emaciated
from the drought,
crying in the desert.
I remember…
As little girls
we leaned close
to listen
to the tallest
of us
as she said,
“I know how the world will end…
Man will destroy himself.”
Tag Archives: poems
Jays
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Poetry
The Visit
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
From the air
I recognize
the greenness of the land,
but especially
the straight, square lines
of sections and highways—
unlike the winding, dusty
roads back home.
I bring a rose
for you, Mama,
nestled in among
names like Berg, Nyquist
And Olson.
Even here
they pick on a person
that does not fit in—
like chickens do
to the least of their own.
These are the descendents
of people who threw
boiling water
from upstairs windows
on the Anishinabe people
as they were marched through
the little towns of Minnesota.
I touch the turquoise
around my neck
and feel its warmth.
In that vast desert
back home,
there is a place called acceptance,
a place my people
would call
a wasteland.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Poetry
Standing in a Field Wishing for Rain
a children’s poem by Thomas Davis
Like fat, old clowns with hilly pants
The clouds stride up the mountain sides
And foam their draughts of bright, white brew
And shout and dance with joyous cries.
I stand three hundred miles away
Upon a grainy yellow plain
And wonder what sweet airy sap
Will fetch clouds past the mountain range.
Although written a long time ago, in a year of terrible drought, this seems an appropriate poem for this drought stricken year.
Filed under Poetry, Thomas Davis
Night Sky
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
The stars laugh and laugh,
laughing in an ocean of laughter,
moving-water laughter,
until the sky can hold no more
and joins in laughing
with black face and shining teeth.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Poetry
26. Escaping Possession
The Dragon Epic by Thomas Davis
Ruarther woke to sunlit cold, his head
So sore he felt as if his life was bound
Inside the thrumming pain that made him scowl.
The burns were gone from arms, legs, chest,
And though he felt as if he could not move,
His spirit rose to know that he’d survived
The night black dragon and its searing flame.
The fire beside the boulder smoldered, smoke
Still rising from the cold, gray, lumpy ash.
He stirred up from the hollow in the snow
He’d made for sleep and, groaning, found his pack
And put a slice of jerky in his mouth.
The goat was strong beneath the heavy spice,
But he had never tasted food so good.
He was alive and eating, wolfing meat
That tasted like sweet honey to his tongue.
He looked toward the campfire, felt the cold,
And thought he’d build it up and warm his hands,
But then he picked his pack up, shouldered it,
And started climbing through the dazzling fields.
He’d not find where the witch’s cottage was
Before the sun blazed down, he told himself.
He’d better move before his will had failed
And warmth became the cause for lethargy.
He’d never kill the child by staying put.
The surface of the snow had frozen hard.
He moved as swiftly as his legs could move.
The walking cleared his head and made him feel
As if he’d found his humanness again.
He thanked the spirit bear inside his mind,
Exhilarated at the strength he felt.
But then, just miles from where the cliffs rose black
Into the winter’s white, he stopped, confused.
The air in front of him looked charged, a mass
Of swirling chaos threatening to end
The world’s solidity with nothingness.
He felt the bear rear up inside the chaos,
Felt snow and fields and light sucked into dark.
A woman, waving hands, had somehow grabbed
The bear with energies Ruarther felt,
But could not see, a battle raging far
Beyond his senses even though he sensed
The powers devastating what was real,
Miasma threatening existence anchored
To life he’d always thought was all that was.
He stepped back as the chaos inched toward
Where he had stopped, the swirling wild with songs
Originating from beyond existence.
A greater fear than what he’d felt the day
He’d faced the golden dragon seized his heart
And made it beat so fast he could not breathe.
He saw the bear’s face waver in the light
And then the woman’s weaving web of hands
As death came from its natural place and tried
To build a portal to Ruarther’s world.
He wondered why he’d left his days-old camp
To face a wilderness he’d thought was myth
Made up by women and old, doddering men.
The great bear turned away from chaos, stared
At where Ruarther stood in front of him
Inside the realness of the real world
And leaped toward the body with a heart.
The witch is doing this, Ruarther thought.
The witch! He tried to dive away from where
The bear had aimed his leap, but even though
He moved as fast as any human could,
Convulsions ripped his consciousness.
He fought against the spirit entering
His spirit, tried to be the self he was,
But in his mind the great bear roared and roared.
Time wavered as the sunlight flared, then died,
Then flared alive again, the chaos mixed
With life’s stability, existence swelling
With spectres lost beyond the boundaries
Of what could ever be or come to be.
The child, Ruarther raged inside himself,
The witch’s child had made the dragon mock
Him as he hunted in the woods that day,
And now she’d witched the bear into his spirit.
He’d kill the child, he roared. He’d kill the girl.
The spirit in him roared against his roar.
Ruarther felt the self he knew recoil
As chaos swirled into his head and bones.
I’m stronger than the bear, he snarled inside.
His heart beat crazily, his fear
The only rage that kept him from possession,
The end of who he was, a human man.
I’ll kill the girl, he chanted in his head.
The witch’s girl is dead. I’ll kill the girl.
The great bear twisted as it fought to find
A place away from where the woman’s hands
Wove order out of chaos in chaotic song.
Ruarther twisted painfully in snow
So cold it seemed to burn his throbbing flesh.
He felt as if he was inside a furnace,
The brick kiln burning with a glowing heat,
His skin so sensitive it seared with pain,
As if he’d touched a fiery red-hot coal
And spread its agony across his face,
Hours blistering into eternity.
The bear retreated from the searing pain,
Life’s sharpness shredding who it was
Into the emptiness of air and sky.
Chaotic swirling dissipated like a mist.
The sunlit cold possessed the world again.
Ruarther, body still, stunned, felt his life
Inside the who of who he was, a man.
Splayed out upon the snow, he wondered how
He’d ever thought he had the strength to kill
A witch so powerful she had the force
To bend a dragon’s spirit to her will.
He could not countenance that he still lived
Outside of deathless chaos in his world.
To listen to this section of the epic, click on Escaping Possession.
Note: This is the twenty-sixth section of a long narrative poem, which has grown into The Dragon Epic. Inspired by John Keats’ long narrative poem, Lamia, it tells a story set in ancient times when dragons and humans were at peace. Click on the numbers below to reach other sections, or go to the Categories box to the right under The Dragon Epic. Click on 1 to go to the beginning and read forward. Go to 25 to go to the section previous to this one. Go to 27 to read the next section.
Filed under Poetry, The Dragon Epic, Thomas Davis
New Mexico
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
Here
we breathe in sky
and out sky,
like the trees
that grow out of rocks,
breathing in sky and living.
He is our father,
the one who made us,
the one who takes
the sky sounds
of hummingbird wings
and gives them to us,
to be our hearts.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Poetry
Hiding Places
a love poem by Thomas Davis
I have hidden my face.
The green grass has grown wild about my house,
And the hiding places of the heart
Have multiplied and become numerous.
Spring croaks and thrashes at the wind.
The stars grow plump like yellow pears,
And the trees stand up, straight and proud,
From the soils of the earth.
I chant the words of love
And let my tongue grow dry with history.
I sing out the beauty of the sky
And tell the clouds to be silent
And to cease their rumbling.
Summer is the promise of the sun.
Conflict is the garment of drama.
O woman, you are the wind
And the sound of the wind.
O woman, you are the spirit of the stars.
I have hidden my face.
The green grass has grown wild about my house.
The hiding places of the heart
Have multiplied and become numerous.
O woman, on slippery ground
I will catch you and hold you in my arms.
Filed under Poetry, Thomas Davis
25. Plotting Human Extinction
an epic poem by Thomas Davis
The darkness, black as scales upon Sshruunak,
Awash with atmospheres that breathed unrest,
Intensified inside the mountain valley
That saw one dragon, then another, then
Another glide with silent wings to land
Into a ring of black obsidian boulders.
Sshruunak, placed in the ring’s dead center, glared
At each great dragon as they flared their wings
And settled in a loop around his force,
Eyes glittering to see he’d left his cave.
No dragon spoke, but waited for Sshruunak.
The wounded male puffed fire into the air.
It let them see each other in the dark,
But only briefly as Sshruunak began
To speak inside his mind about his plans.
“The humans cannot live,” he said. “Their minds
Are dangerous to dragonkind, their tools
As evil as their deadliness and hate.
I’ve learned,” he said, his voice still silent, “how
Our strength is not enough to make them cower.
They swarm like wasps inside a paper hive
And pour out on the ground with deadly arrows
As if their puny bodies boiled alive
The end of who we’ve been through centuries
Of living strength upon this earth, our earth.
I’ve lost an eye and feel the pain they bring
To every dragon who has sense to rage
Against abomination in our midst.
“I’ve brooded long,” he said. “I’ve seen their power.
I’ve seen that if we try to use our strength,
Our fiery breath, our flight, our deadly claws,
To end the peril that they represent,
We’ll end up fertilizing earth in graves
That mark the final end of dragonkind.
Old Mmirrimann is not the fool he seems.
Ssruanne’s geas capturing our spirits
Burns from a knowledge born of memories
And senses I have never known or dreamed.”
His rumbling stopped. The long necks of the others
Stopped moving from the trance he’d interweaved
About them, capturing them through his mind.
At last, the silence lengthening, Ssshraann,
The dragon closest to Sshruunak, his red,
Dark scales dull in the valley’s darkness, sneered.
“And so we hide inside our caves and let the humans
Grow stronger year by year as dragons weaken?”
He shook his massive head and almost grinned.
“That’s not Sshruunak,” he said, his voice intense.
Sshruunak stayed silent, but his voice rang out
Inside his head and stunned the other males.
“The humans swarm,” he said. “Like ants or wasps,
And then they use their tools to penetrate
Our scales and seek our vulnerabilities.”
He paused, his eyes alight with swirling colors.
“Each dragon feels his power in his hearts.
He breathes his fire and spreads his massive wings
And throws himself at puny, boiling ants
And rends and tears their flesh and spills their blood
In gallons on the ground and murders them.
But never does a dragon swarm and boil
Like wasps stirred from a threatened nest,
And so we fly into their stinging arrows
And die as solitary as our spirits.
We murder them, but let their numbers murder
Each one of us as if we were alone
And had no species linked to who we are.”
“We learn to form an army like the humans?”
Sshraann asked. “Act like insubstantial fools?”
Sshruunak raged fire into the night, his breath
So hot it penetrated dragon hides
And made each dragon step away from him.
The great snow covered peaks around the valley
Grew even darker as his fire went on and on.
He roared so loud an avalanche began
To roar in distance down a mountainside.
The males, eyes glittering, stared amazed
At dragon power unleashed into the world.
The silence following the roar was sudden,
A chaos filled with dreadful absences.
Sshruunak’s great head bowed down toward the snow
Inside the circle of obsidian.
He spoke outloud, his voice as soft as snow
Descending slowly out of windless skies.
“I see us flying in a full moon’s golden light,”
He said. “As silent as my voice is now.
We’re primed with fire and human discipline.
Each one has targets to attack and kill.
Each one of us is bound by orders planned
So that we decimate our enemies.
We come upon a human town and swoop
Into the human helplessness and burn
Their leaders as they try to form defense
Against a threat they’ve never thought would come.
I see our legions wing into their mass,
Our darkness deadly, purpose aimed and armed
With knowledge born of dragon strength and wiles.
I see the humans dying like the ants they are,
Their villages and towns black, smoking ruins.”
Sshraann grinned in the darkness, showed his teeth,
And looked into Sshruunak’s bright, whirling eyes.
He felt the dragon army forming in the night
Around him, Drressel, Stoormachen, Waanderlund,
The leading males born since the human peace
Born in the caves agreeing with the vision
Of dragons massed into an army, flying
Through moonlit skies toward the final answer
To humans and their domination of the earth.
Click on Planning Human Extinction to listen to this section of the epic.
Note: This is the twenty fifth section of a long narrative poem, which has grown into The Dragon Epic. Inspired by John Keats’ long narrative poem, Lamia, it tells a story set in ancient times when dragons and humans were at peace. Click on the numbers below to reach other sections, or go to the Categories box to the right under The Dragon Epic. Click on 1 to go to the beginning and read forward. Go to 24 to go to the section previous to this one. Click on 26 to go to the next part of the epic.
Filed under Poetry, The Dragon Epic, Thomas Davis
Absence
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
What else could
I do today?
What else but work the soil?
Work the soil
around the corn and beans,
the green squash.
The beans are vining,
feeling for the corn’s torso.
The corn is up
to my shoulders
and beginning to tassel out.
The afternoon clouds
have brought
a hard male rain
in the hottest
and driest year
we remember.
What else could we do
but work the soil?
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Poetry
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